DEBATING NEW APPROACHES

TO HISTORY
Also available from Bloomsbury

WRITING HISTORY: THEORY AND PRACTICE (2nd Edition), edited by Heiko

Feldner, Kevin Passmore, and Stefan Berger

NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY, edited by Sasha

Handley, Rohan McWilliam, and Lucy Noakes

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO STUDYING HISTORY: SKILLS AND APPROACHES,

edited by Tracey Loughran
DEBATING NEW APPROACHES
TO HISTORY

Edited by Marek Tamm and Peter Burke

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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CONTENTS

List of Figures vii

List of Contributors viii

Introduction: A Framework for Debating New Approaches

to History Marek Tamm 1

1 Global History Jürgen Osterhammel 21

Comment: Pierre-Yves Saunier 35
Response: Jürgen Osterhammel 40

2 Postcolonial History Rochona Majumdar 49

Comment: Prasenjit Duara 64
Response: Rochona Majumdar 69

3 Environmental History Grégory Quenet 75

Comment: Sverker Sörlin 86
Response: Grégory Quenet 91

4 Gender History Laura Lee Downs 101

Comment: Miri Rubin 115
Response: Laura Lee Downs 120

5 History of Memory Geoffrey Cubitt 127

Comment: Ann Rigney 143
Response: Geoffrey Cubitt 148

6 History of Knowledge Martin Mulsow 159

Comment: Lorraine Daston 173
Response: Martin Mulsow 179

7 History of Emotions Piroska Nagy 189

Comment: Ute Frevert 202
Response: Piroska Nagy 208

8 History of Things Ivan Gaskell 217

Comment: Bjørnar Olsen 232
Response: Ivan Gaskell 239
Contents

9 History of Visual Culture Gil Bartholeyns 247

Comment: Jean-Claude Schmitt 262
Response: Gil Bartholeyns 266

10 Digital History Jane Winters 277

Comment: Steve F. Anderson 289
Response: Jane Winters 294

11 Neurohistory Rob Boddice 301

Comment: Daniel Lord Smail 313
Response: Rob Boddice 318

12 Posthumanist History Ewa Domanska 327

Comment: Dominick LaCapra 338
Response: Ewa Domanska 343

Conclusion Peter Burke 353

Index 363

vi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 8.1 Guidon of the Sixth Independent Battery, Massachusetts Volunteer

Light Artillery, c. 1862, silk, General Artemas Ward House Museum,
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Courtesy of General Artemas Ward House
Museum 224
Figure 8.2 Sarony, Major, and Knapp after William Bauly, Our Heaven Born
Banner, 1861, chromolithograph, Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Public domain 225
Figure 8.3 Guidon of the Sixth Independent Battery, Massachusetts Volunteer
Light Artillery, c. 1862, silk, General Artemas Ward House Museum,
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts (detail). Courtesy by General Artemas
Ward House Museum 226
Figure 9.1 The Seven Deadly Sins, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1505,
oil on wood, 119.5 × 139.5 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public
domain 251
Figure 9.2 Foldable peep box dated 1760, with a magnifying lens 12 cm in
diameter and inclined mirror, allowing for the placement of seven
layers to create an illusion of depth. Martin Engelbrecht, Augsburg
(Germany), 20.2 × 22 × 81 cm (closed). Centre national du cinéma et
de l’image animée, CNC-AP-11-1119 b. Photo courtesy by Stéphane
Dabrowski – La Cinémathèque française 258
Figure 9.3 Absorption lines (dark lines) in the solar spectrum, now known as
Fraunhofer lines. Spectroscopy by Joseph von Fraunhofer, 1814.
Courtesy of Deutsches Museum, Munich 260
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Steve F. Anderson is Professor of Digital Media in the School of Theatre, Film and
Television at the University of California, Los Angeles, working at the intersection of
media, history, technology, and culture. He is the founder/principal investigator of the
public media archive and fair use advocacy network Critical Commons. Along with Tara
McPherson, he is co-editor of the interdisciplinary electronic journal Vectors and co-
principal investigator of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, developers of the
open source electronic publishing platform Scalar. He is the author of Technologies of
History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth College Press, 2011)
and Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (MIT Press, 2017).

Gil Bartholeyns is an associate professor at the University of Lille, where he is in

charge of the MA and PhD programmes in visual humanities. His recent research is
focused on domestic cultures, miraculous images from the Middle Ages to today,
and on visual experiences of the past in contemporary societies. He is the author
of Image et transgression au Moyen Age with P.O. Dittmar and V. Jolivet (PUF,
2008), and the editor of Adam et l’astragale. Essais d’anthropologie et d’histoire sur
les limites de l’humain, with P.O. Dittmar et al. (Editions de la MSH, 2009); La
performance des images, with A. Dierkens and T. Golsenne (Brussels University Press,
2010); Culture matérielles: anthologie raisonnée, with N. Govoroff and F. Joulian
(Editions de la MSH, 2011); Politiques visuelles (Les Presses du réel, 2016) as well as
Images de soi dans l’univers domestique (with M. Bourin and P-O. Dittmar, PUR, 2018).

Rob Boddice is Marie-Curie Global Fellow at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie

Universität Berlin, and at McGill University, Montreal. His research is focused on the history
of pain, sympathy, cruelty, disease, and evolution, with particular emphasis on the moral
status of human beings and other animals. His recent book publications include The Science
of Sympathy: Morality; Evolution and Victorian Civilization (Illinois University Press, 2016);
Pain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017); The History of Emotions
(Manchester University Press, 2018); and A History of Feelings (Reaktion, forthcoming).

Peter Burke is Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Life Fellow of Emmanuel
College, University of Cambridge. He is also a fellow of the British Academy and
member of the Academia Europea. He is a specialist in the social and cultural history of
early modern Europe as well as in theoretical and methodological questions of historical
research. His most recent books include What Is the History of Knowledge? (Polity, 2015);
Secret History and Historical Consciousness from Renaissance to Romanticism (Edward
Everett Root, 2016); and Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000
(Brandeis University Press, 2017).
 List of Contributors

Geoffrey Cubitt is a reader in the Department of History, and Director of the Institute
for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP) at the University of York. His recent
research focuses on social memory, commemoration, museum representations of history,
and the political and cultural uses of the past in modern and contemporary societies. He
is the author of The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century
France (Oxford University Press, 1993) and History and Memory (Manchester University
Press, 2007) and editor of Imaging Nations (Manchester University Press, 1998); Heroic
Reputations and Exemplary Lives (with A. Warren, Manchester University Press, 2000);
and Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements (with
L. Smith, R. Wilson, and K. Fouseki, Routledge, 2011).

Lorraine Daston is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in
Berlin and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of
Chicago. She has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including
the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence
of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority
of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Her recent books include (with
Paul Erikson et al.) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War
Rationality (Chicago University Press, 2014) and Histories of Scientific Observation, ed.
with Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago University Press, 2011).

Ewa Domanska is Professor of Human Sciences in the Department of History,

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and Visiting Associate Professor in
the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. Her teaching and research
interests include the comparative theory of the human and social sciences, the
history and theory of historiography, ecological humanities, genocide and ecocide
studies. Her more recent publications include Re-Figuring Hayden White (ed. with
Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner, Stanford University Press, 2009); Existential
History: A Critical Approach to Narrativism and Emancipatory Humanities (in Polish,
2012); and Necros: An Introduction to the Ontology of Human Corpses and Remains
(in Polish, 2017).

Laura Lee Downs is Professor of History at the European University Institute,

Florence, where she holds the chair in gender history, and is Directrice d’Études at
the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where she holds a chair in the
comparative history of social management. She has published extensively on issues
of gender and labour in twentieth-century Europe, on working-class childhood, and
on the comparative history of social protection in Europe. She has also published
widely on gender analysis and historical method, most notably in her Writing Gender
History (2nd edn, Bloomsbury, 2010). Her publications also include Childhood in the
Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France,
1880–1960 (Duke University Press, 2002), and Why France? American Historians
Reflect on an Enduring Fascination, ed. with Stéphane Gerson (Cornell University
Press, 2007).

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List of Contributors

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar L. Tang Family Professor of East Asian Studies at Duke
University, and previously worked as the Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National
University of Singapore where he was also director of the Asian Research Institute and
Research in Humanities and Social Sciences (2008–15). In addition to Chinese history,
he works more broadly on Asia in the twentieth century, and on historical thought and
historiography. Among his recent books are The Global and Regional in China’s Nation-
Formation (Routledge, 2009) and The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and
a Sustainable Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He has recently co-edited A
Companion to Global Historical Thought (John Wiley, 2014).

Ute Frevert is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a
scientific member of the Max Planck Society. From 2003 to 2007 she was Professor of
German History at Yale University and previously taught history at the University of
Konstanz, Bielefeld University, and the Free University in Berlin. Her research interests
include the social and cultural history of the modern period, the history of emotions,
gender history, and political history. Her recent publications include Emotions in History:
Lost and Found (Central European University Press, 2011); Gefühlspolitik: Friedrich II.
als Herr über die Herzen? (Wallstein, 2012); Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature
and the History of Emotional Socialization, 1870-1970 (Oxford University Press, 2014);
and Die Politik der Demütigung: Schauplätze von Macht und Ohnmacht (Fischer, 2017).

Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies, and Head of the
Focus Project at Bard Graduate Center, New York City, having taught and curated at
Harvard University between 1991 and 2011. His areas of special interests are the material
culture of North America and Europe from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries,
and philosophy of museums and material culture. Recently he has published Tangible
Things: Making History through Objects, with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Sara J. Schechner,
Sarah Anne Carter, and photographs by Samantha S. B. van Gerbig (Oxford University
Press 2015), Sturm der Bilder: Bürger, Moral und Politik in den Niederlanden, 1515–1616,
with Martin van Gelderen (Kunst, 2016), and The Oxford Handbook of History and
Material Culture, ed. with Sarah Anne Carter (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Dominick LaCapra is Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor Emeritus of Humanistic

Studies at Cornell University. His scholarly interests range widely in the areas of modern
European intellectual and cultural history, historiography, trauma studies, history and
literature, and critical theory. He is the author or editor of many books, including most
recently History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press,
2004); History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Cornell University Press, 2009)
and History, Literature, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Departments of Cinema and Media

Studies, and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She
is a historian of modern India and her interests span the histories of Indian cinema,
gender, and marriage in colonial India, and Indian intellectual thought in the nineteenth

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 List of Contributors

and twentieth centuries. She has published Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in
Colonial Bengal (Duke University Press, 2009); Writing Postcolonial History (Bloomsbury,
2010); and From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, ed.
with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Martin Mulsow is Professor of Cultures of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe and

Director of the Gotha Research Centre at the University of Erfurt. He previously worked
as professor of history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick (2005–08), specializing in
the history of early modern Europe, with research interests located between the history
of philosophy, the history of ideas, historical anthropology, and cultural history. Among
his recent book publications are Prekäres Wissen. Eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen
Neuzeit (Suhrkamp, 2012); Enlightenment Underground: Radical Germany, 1680–1720
(Virginia University Press, 2015); and Decorum and Disorder: The Republic of Letters
1550–1750 (Michigan University Press, forthcoming).

Piroska Nagy is Professor of Medieval History at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Her research explores the relation between collective religious emotions, events, and
change in the Middle Ages and medieval affective anthropology, especially embodied
religious emotions, experience, and charismas. She is author of Le don des larmes au
Moyen Age: Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution, Ve–XIIIe siècle (Albin Michel,
2000) and co-author, with Damien Boquet, of Medieval Sensibilities: A History of
Emotions in the Middle Ages (Polity, 2018). Recently she has also edited with N. Cohen-
Hanegbi the volume Pleasure in the Middle Ages (Brepols, 2018).

Bjørnar Olsen is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Tromsø – the Arctic

University of Norway. He has worked with northern and Sámi archaeology as well with
theoretical issues in archaeology. His research interests also include contemporary
archaeology, modern ruins, material memory, and thing theory. His latest books are
In Defence of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (AltaMira Press, 2010);
Persistent Memories: Pyramiden – a Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic (with E.
Andreassen and H. Bjerck, Tapir Academic Press, 2010); Archaeology: The Discipline
of Things (with M. Shanks, T. Webmoor, and C. Witmore, California University Press,
2012); Hunters in Transition: An Outline of Early Sámi History (with L.I. Hansen, Brill,
2014); and Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent
Past, ed. with Þ. Pétursdóttir (Routledge, 2014).

Jürgen Osterhammel is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Contemporary History at the

University of Konstanz. He works on European and Asian history from the eighteenth
century. He has also published widely on history and theory of historiography, and
is currently preparing a study of Jacob Burckhardt as a world historian. His recent
publications include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth
Century (Princeton University Press, 2014); Die Flughöhe der Adler: Historische Essays
zur globalen Gegenwart (Beck, 2017); Decolonization: A Short History (with Jan C. Jansen,
Princeton University Press, 2017), and Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter

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List of Contributors

with Asia (Princeton University Press, 2018). With Akira Iriye, he is the editor-in-chief of
A History of the World in six volumes (Harvard University Press, since 2012).

Grégory Quenet is Professor of Environmental History at the University of Versailles-

Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. He has worked on the intellectual history of environmental
history (Qu’est-ce que l’histoire environnementale?, Champ Vallon, 2014) and case studies
such as natural disasters (Les tremblements de terre en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,
Champ Vallon, 2005) and iconic national places revisited (Versailles, histoire naturelle,
La Découverte, 2015). His current research deals with a global history of Paradise islands
and historical regimes of nature.

Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research

is located at the intersections between narrative, cultural memory, and contestations of
the past. She has published widely in the field of modern memory cultures, with projects
both on the nineteenth century and on contemporary developments, including most
recently The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford University Press,
2012; 2017); Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed. with Chiara de
Cesari (De Gruyter, 2014); and Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe,
ed. with Joep Leerssen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at the School of
History, Queen Mary University of London. Her research has ranged across the period
1100–1600, through the exploration of themes in the religious cultures of Europe, with
a special interest in social and community relations, Jewish-Christian relations, gender,
identity and the body, and visual and material expressions of ideas and practices. She
has recently published Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Allen Lane, 2009);
Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (Central
European University Press, 2009); The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, ed. with
Walter Simons (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and A Very Short Introduction to
the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also edited and translated The
Life and Passion of William of Norwich (Penguin, 2014).

Pierre-Yves Saunier is Professor of European History at Université Laval, Québec,

Canada. His research interests lie in modern history of Europe, with a focus on urban
history, history of international organizations, nursing history, and transnational history.
His previous publications include The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed.
with Akira Iriye (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); The Other Global City: Explorations into the
Transnational Municipal Moment 1850–2000, ed. with Shane Ewen (Palgrave Macmillan,
2009); and Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Jean-Claude Schmitt is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales, Paris, where he directed from 1992 to 2014 the Groupe d’Anthropologie
Historique de l’Occident Médiéval. He has published extensively on the socio-cultural
aspects of medieval history in Western Europe and has made important contributions
in using anthropological and art historical methods to interpret history. His recent

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 List of Contributors

books include The Conversion of Herman the Jew (Pennsylvania University Press, 2010);
L’invention de l’anniversaire (Arkhe, 2012, new edn 2017); Les rythmes au Moyen Âge
(Gallimard, 2016); and Rêver de soi: Les songes autobiographiques au Moyen Age, ed. with
Gisèle Besson (Anacharsis, 2017).
Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where
he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and
1600 and on deep human history. In medieval history, his work has explored the social
and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the
later Middle Ages. His work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the
methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past.
His recent publications include On Deep History and the Brain (University of California
Press, 2008) and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past
and Present (University of California Press, 2011), as well as Legal Plunder: Households
and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Sverker Sörlin is Professor of Environmental History at the Division of History of
Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in
Stockholm. He has published in the fields of history of science, environmental history,
the history of forestry, human ecology, environmental humanities, innovations studies,
and the history and politics of higher education. Among his recent book publications
are Science, Geopolitics and Culture in the Polar Region (2013); The Future of Nature:
Documents of Global Change, ed. with Libby Robin and Paul Warde (Yale University Press,
2013); Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, ed.
with Dolly Jørgensen (University of British Columbia Press, 2014); and The Environment:
A History, with Libby Robin and Paul Warde (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
Marek Tamm is Professor of Cultural History and Senior Research Fellow in Medieval
Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. He is also Head of Tallinn
University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and of the Estonian Graduate
School of Culture Studies and Arts. His primary research fields are the cultural history
of medieval Europe, the theory and history of historiography as well as cultural memory
studies. He has recently published Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic
Frontier, ed. with Linda Kaljundi and Carsten Selch Jensen (Ashgate, 2011); Afterlife of
Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and How to Study
Culture? Methodology of Culture Studies (in Estonian, Tallinn University Press, 2016).
Jane Winters is Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study,
University of London. Her research interests include digital history, web archives, big
data for humanities research, peer review in the digital environment, text editing, and
open access publishing. She has led or co-directed a range of digital projects, including
Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities; Digging into Linked Parliamentary
Metadata; Traces through Time: Prosopography in Practice across Big Data; the Thesaurus
of British and Irish History as SKOS; and Born Digital Big Data and Approaches for
History and the Humanities. She has published The Creighton Century, 1907–2007, ed.
with David Bates and Jennifer Wallis (Institute of Historical Research, 2009).

xiii
xiv
INTRODUCTION
A FRAMEWORK FOR DEBATING NEW
APPROACHES TO HISTORY
Marek Tamm

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (1891)

‘History is the intellectual form in which a culture gives account of its past’ was the
memorable way for defining history proposed in 1929 by the Dutch historian Johan
Huizinga (1929: 166). In fact, this is rather similar to another definition articulated by
Huizinga’s great predecessor, the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt (2007: 179), at the
end of the nineteenth century; in his view, history is ‘the record of what one age finds
worthy of note in another’. We need not conclude from these definitions that the study
of the past could be reduced to the requirements of the present, or to a social demand –
certainly the internal explorations of the academic world must be taken into account; yet
it seems clear that developments in history writing cannot be discussed in isolation from
major social, technological, cultural, and other changes. Thus, in order to understand
the new approaches and major debates in history of recent decades – that being the
main aim of the present volume – we must first pay attention to some deeper tendencies
prevalent in the modern (Western) world: to changes in the culture’s fundamental
principles, technological opportunities, and in our attitudes to the environment.

Alternative spatialities

Time and space, the two fundamental categories of Western culture, have undergone
important shifts over the past decades. The modernist time regime dating back to the
eighteenth century (with academic historiography as one of its fruits) as well as the
Eurocentric hierarchically articulated conception of space (with its close link between
history and nation) have crumbled or at least lost their air of self-evidence, by now.
In recent times, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of alternative ideas of
spatiality and temporality which, of course, have exercised retroactive influence on how
we conceptualize historical space and time
I don’t think it is any longer necessary to adopt any ideological position in order
to regard ‘globalization’ as the focal byword of our times – a concept so polyvalent as
to be well fit for the role of a common denominator for various processes often only
weakly linked to each other. Although the term goes back right to the 1930s and was
Debating New Approaches to History

first taken into use in the context of education and international relations, its true
breakthrough took place in the 1990s (James and Steger 2014; see also Osterhammel
and Petersson 2005). In its most general sense, globalization refers to the ever-greater
interconnectedness, entanglement of the world – its ‘compression’, as it were. Although
driven mostly by market forces, globalization undoubtedly is far more than just an
economic phenomenon; instead, its political, cultural, ecological, and ideological
dimensions must be taken into account (Steger 2017).
It is fair to say that globalization has forced or inspired historians to search for
spatial alternatives in making sense of the past, to pay more attention to supranational
connections and networks. These searches have given rise to a number of approaches
that, under various names such as transnational history, connected history, entangled
history, or global history, share the same desire to move beyond conventional geopolitical
articulations and discrete civilizations, to turn the concept of space again into a significant
theoretical category. Unlike traditional universal or world history, the new trends (which
we could, for convenience’ sake, group under the name of global history) do not tell a story
about everything that has come to pass in the world – ‘global’ does not refer so much to
the object of study but to a perspective that focuses on connections, entanglements, and
integration (see Chapter 1). As Sebastian Conrad (2016: 90) has happily summed it up:
‘Global history as a distinct approach explores alternative spatialities, is fundamentally
relational, and is self-reflective on the issue of Eurocentrism. … It means that global
history takes structured integration as a context, even when it is not the main topic.’
Global history sets store by what Jacques Revel (1996) has called ‘scale shifts’
(jeux d’échelles) – a study of past phenomena on different scales so as to bring to light
unexpected associations, link seemingly isolated phenomena, map overlapping spaces. It
becomes ever more important in the study of history not to set out from a given spatial
framework but to follow the ideas, people, and things selected for study, no matter where
they may lead. Thus, history becomes a multilayered and intertwined process wherein
the different layers are characterized by a different logic, a different tempo, and a different
geographical extension. In the eyes of a global historian, the world is indeed an integrated
phenomenon, yet it is also internally heterogeneous. Therefore, the triumph of the global
perspective of history does not imply the loss of the local dimension; instead, it becomes
important to discuss local and global, micro- and macro-history conjointly, even to the
extent of developing a ‘global microhistory’ – an effort for which there have, in recent
times, already been calls (Andrade 2010; Trivellato 2011; Medick 2016).
Globalization has been paralleled by the ebbing importance of the West in the world
– what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has memorably called ‘provincializing Europe’, or
what can, in turn, be linked to the phenomenon known as ‘empire writes back’ (Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin 1989). The crumbling of empires and the process of decolonization
have called into question many historiographical tenets that had taken root over more
than a century, linked either to teleological narratives, West-centred periodizations or
a progressivist notion of time that doomed non-European colonized regions to a place
in an ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 8). Over the last decades,
postcolonialist history (see Chapter 2) has successfully contributed to a revision of West-

2
 Introduction

centred history writing (Majumdar 2010), while a ‘new imperial history’ has helped
place the history of colonies and the metropolis into one and the same framework and
show that both are understandable only in the general context of imperialism (Wilson
2004; Howe 2010).
It is well known that academic history writing and nation-building have been closely
related from the start; nationalism has been a major factor feeding interest in history,
and history has provided important material for nation- and national identity-building
(Berger and Conrad 2015). From the nineteenth century on, the nation state has been
taken for granted as the primary unit of history writing. Global history in its diverse
aspects is, indeed, first and foremost unified by a desire to leave behind ‘methodological
nationalism’, an approach that naturalizes the nation state and follows the implicit
conviction ‘that a particular nation would provide the constant unit of observation
through all historical transformations, the “thing” whose change history was supposed
to describe’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002: 305). Recent research has clearly
demonstrated that even for the heyday of nationalism it is useful not to think of the nation
as a given and isolated ‘container’ but rather to regard it in a broader systemic context,
in terms of the connected influences of various transnational factors (see Tamm 2016).
Even though global history has become possible primarily due to the globalization
of present-day spatial experience – ‘global spatiality implies global history’, as Prasenjit
Duara and his colleagues have observed (Duara, Murthy, and Sartori 2014: 1) – this does
not necessarily mean it is a temporary phenomenon that will again disappear as new
trends arise. Rather, one can agree with those who may not foresee a long life for ‘global
history’ or related notions, but also consider it highly unlikely that the world could cease
to be seen as a more or less integrated phenomenon so that traditional spatial categories
could be revived (Sachsenmaier 2011: 245; Conrad 2016: 235).

Alternative temporalities

The ‘compression of space’ accompanying globalization is related to a phenomenon

that has with increasing frequency come to be called ‘acceleration of time’ (Rosa
2013; Wajcman 2015). In fact, the metaphor seems to remain somewhat constrained,
particularly in the context of the study of history, and it would be more to the point to
speak about a pluralization and expansion of the perception of time, about the crumbling
of a progressivist and linear notion of time. This shift can be presented as a downturn
of the modernist time regime (Assmann 2013) that saw time as a ‘necessary agent of
change’ and presumed ‘an asymmetry between the past as a circumscribed space of
experience and the future as an open horizon of expectations’ (Gumbrecht 1998: 420; cf.
Gumbrecht 2014). Nowadays, a notion succinctly articulated by Michel Serres is gaining
ground: ‘every historical era is likewise multitemporal, simultaneously drawing from the
obsolete, the contemporary, and the futuristic’ (Serres and Latour 1995: 60; for an earlier
history of this idea, see Landwehr 2012). Historians are ever more eager to ‘break with
the idea of the fully contemporaneous present’ (Bevernage 2015: 351) and ‘embrace the

3
Debating New Approaches to History

richness and variability of different forms of time that exist throughout our lives’ (Tanaka
2015: 161). Whereas the traditional, historicist history writing valued coherence, kept
the past clearly apart from the present, and strove to gloss over temporal discontinuities,
the contemporary non-linear history writing ‘allows for a pluralisation of times and
to conceive of the present, past and future as multidimensional and purely relational
categories’ (Lorenz 2014: 46). As in the case of space, the new attitude to (historical)
time has also partially been shaped by a postcolonialist perspective, demonstrating a
clear connection between historicist and colonialist notions of time and emphasizing
that ‘the writing of history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together,
a disjuncture of the present with itself ’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 108).
In modern history writing, the alternative notion of historical time that we may try to
capture in the concept of ‘multiple temporalities’ (Jordheim 2012; 2014) has taken very
varied shapes. By way of example, I am going to present here two most characteristic
extremes. ‘In many realms of historical writing, big is back’, David Armitage (2012:
493) wrote some years ago, with a certain amount of euphoria. In the same article, he
proposed a new concept, ‘transtemporal history’, that, taking its cue from ‘transnational
history’, intends ‘to stress elements of linkage and comparison across time, much as
transnational history deals with such connections across space’. Yet he immediately
considers it necessary to specify that ‘transtemporal history is not transhistorical: it is
time-bound not timeless’ (2012: 498). ‘Transtemporal history’ would appear to be a
convenient umbrella term capable of covering the various opportunities for expanding
the historians’ temporal horizons that have been proposed over the past few years: big
history, deep history, evolutionary history, history of longue durée, and so on.
‘Big history’, in all likelihood, is the best known and most ambitious of them, even if
also the most criticized in the context of academic history writing. Tracing its origins
back to the 1990s, big history wishes to take the beginnings of history back to the Big
Bang, identifying universal history with the history of the universe. At the same time, the
focus still remains on man: big history is ‘an account of human history written with the
Earthrise view in mind’ (Spier 2015: 179). David Christian, a foremost advocate of this
line of thought, opens his book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (2004) with
the origins of the universe and winds it up with a survey of the ‘modern era’. Big history
draws the majority of its data not from the conventional historical disciplines but from
cosmology, astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology.
‘Deep history’ is the younger brother of big history, with an even clearer focus on
the past of humanity, but in as long a temporal perspective as possible, proposing ‘a
new architecture for human history’ (Shryock and Smail 2011). Deep history relevantly
reminds us of the fact that of the entire past history of humankind, conventional
historiography covers but a trifling part – just a few seconds, if we were to liken the
history of humanity to a clock with a twenty-four-hour display: ‘If we imagine the 5
million years of human evolutionary time as a 24-hour period, the entire 300,000 years
of modern humanity comprises about an hour and a half, the 60,000 years since modern
humans left Africa comprise about 17 minutes, and the 12,000 years since the end of the
Pleistocene comprise slightly more than 4 minutes’ (Brooke 2014: 114). Daniel Lord Smail

4
 Introduction

and other proponents of ‘deep history’ argue that historians still write within ‘the grip of
sacred history’ (Smail 2008: 12–39), according to which the sources of human culture
can go back no further than 4000 BC. Yet the definition of history should not be based
on the invention of writing, but upon the evolution of anatomically modern humans.
That is, ‘paleohistorians’, as the representatives of ‘deep history’ have called themselves,
rely on anthropology, archaeology, genetics, neurophysiology, and evolutionary biology:
‘Histories can be written from every type of trace, from the memoir to the bone fragment
and the blood type’ (Shryock and Smail 2011: 13).
The temporal scope of the ‘evolutionary history’ proposed by Edmund Russell, ‘that
studies the ways populations of human beings and other species have shaped each
other’s traits over time and the significance of those changes for all those populations’
(Russell 2011: 5), places it in the same series with the previous two approaches. This
would, of course, mean stretching the historians’ perspective to include the temporal
scale of human evolution as a whole, and addressing evidence completely different from
the one that historians have been habituated to work with.
The same desire to broaden the historians’ time horizon is well expressed in the much-
vaunted The History Manifesto (2014) by Jo Guldi and David Armitage. Tending slightly
towards exaggeration they state that contemporary history is haunted by the spectre of
the short term, whereas ‘long-term thinking about the past and the future proliferates
outside the discipline of history’ (Guldi and Armitage 2014: 61). Thus, their book urges
historians to return to the perspective of longue durée that, according to the authors,
characterized the study of history as recently as a couple of academic generations ago.
This return, Guldi and Armitage believe, is propelled by technological development, by
which they mean first and foremost the massive digitization of sources and the new
opportunities for quantitative analysis provided by it (Armitage and Guldi 2015: 290).
But the alternative temporality of our days is also characterized by another tendency,
contrasting with the former, that has been called the emergence of ‘presentism’ as a new
‘regime of historicity’ by François Hartog (2015). While over the last couple of centuries,
a future-oriented ‘regime of historicity’ dominated in the West, future as a means of
interpreting our historical experience has, over the past decades, clearly been receding
and giving ground to a focus on the present. ‘After “1990” both the past and the future
seem to have collapsed as points of orientation, so to speak – and as a consequence
academic history is stuck in the present’ (Lorenz 2010: 93). In Hartog’s view, this shift
is exemplified by the rapid growth of the importance of heritage, museums, memories,
commemorations, witnesses, victims, and so on, with the extensive popularity of
memory studies being one of the most significant among them. From the perspective of
presentism or memory, the past is far from final or irreversible but lives on in many ways;
the past has become part of the present. In relation to this, Berber Bevernage (2011: 5)
has made the important observation: ‘A persisting “past” does not simply deconstruct
the notions of absence and distance; rather, it blurs the strict delineation between past
and present and thereby even questions the existence of these temporal dimensions as
separate entities.’ The treatment of history not as something that ‘is irremediably gone’,
but ‘as ongoing process’ (Runia 2014: 57), has enabled historians to ask new questions,

5
Debating New Approaches to History

no longer about the original meaning of past phenomena but rather about how these
have later been carried on, supplied with new meanings, appropriated and actualized;
about their perpetuation in time and their spectral energy (Tamm 2013; Kleinberg
2017). Jan Assmann has called this new approach ‘mnemohistory’ (Gedächtnisgeschichte,
in German) which ‘is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as
it is remembered. … It concentrates exclusively on those aspects of significance and
relevance which are the product of memory – that is, of a recourse to a past – and which
appear only in the light of later readings’ (Assmann 1997: 9; see also Tamm 2015). The
introduction of memory into the study of history, the rise of the history of memory (see
Chapter 5), has thus significantly transformed the traditional linear concept of time in
history. All in all, the two general trends described above – increased attention both
to ‘deep past’ and to ‘persistent past’ – mark a considerably broader understanding of
temporality than those that used to characterize history writing for a long time.

Anthropocene and more-than-human history

The growing interest in ‘transtemporal history’ is symptomatic of another radical change

that is redefining our relations with the environment and thereby also our relation to the
past. Among representatives of different disciplines, there has been growing recognition
that the evolution of planet Earth has reached a phase where humankind has become
one of the major factors shaping its destiny. This has been the inspiration for coining
the term ‘Anthropocene’, to signify a new, post-Holocene epoch in the geological history
of the Earth. Although the name has not yet been officially confirmed by the relevant
organizations and its precise definition is still being debated, it has by now spread virally
in natural as well as human and social sciences. More generally, ‘Anthropocene’ refers
to the notable human impact on the Earth’s ecological systems and geology, an impact
that has grown particularly weighty over the last half century (the so-called Great
Acceleration) and is revealed most clearly by climate change, the extinction of species,
and various environmental problems. Bruno Latour (2017: 60) has recently summed
this new unexpected situation up very succinctly: ‘Today, the decorations, the props,
the backstage, the whole edifice have mounted onto the stage and are contesting the
actors for the main role. This changes all the scripts, suggests completely new outcomes.
Humans are no longer the only actors, even as they find they have been entrusted a role
much too important for them.’
Thus, the Anthropocene is radically de-centring humans and has led to the placing of
human activity in deep co-evolutionary time – or, as Chakrabarty (2015: 181) states, ‘We
have fallen into “deep” history, into deep, geological time. This falling into “deep” history
carries a certain shock of recognition – recognition of the otherness of the planet and its
very large-scale spatial and temporal processes of which we have, unintentionally, become
a part.’ Chakrabarty was among the first to raise the issue of how the Anthropocene
would influence our understanding of history, underscoring most importantly the
conclusion that the new situation would mark the ‘collapse of the age-old humanist

6
 Introduction

distinction between natural history and human history’ (Chakrabarty 2009: 201) and
that historians must discuss humans and their history within a much broader context, to
‘think of humans as a form of life and look on human history as part of the history of life
on this planet’ (Chakrabarty 2009: 213). Thus, the Anthropocene not only implies the
recognition of human responsibility for major environmental and climate changes, but is
more fundamentally part of a readjustment of the relationship between the human and
the natural world. It has afforded an opportunity to conceptualize history in a completely
new and unexpected manner, to give up the traditional view of ‘human exceptionalism’
and to integrate the environment and other forms of life into history writing, but no
longer as passive objects or external decorations, but as active agents in their own rights.
The hypothesis of the Anthropocene has called for a revision and surpassing of various
deeply rooted distinctions in historical epistemology, such as, for instance, between
natural history and human history, written history and deep history, human history
and multispecies history, national history and planetary history. More generally, the
Anthropocene may indeed be discussed, from the perspective of history, as ‘the reunion
of human (historical) time and Earth (geological) time, between human agency and non-
human agency’, which ‘gives the lie to this – temporal, ontological, epistemological and
institutional – great divide between nature and society that widened in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 38). The Anthropocene has enabled us
to understand the anthropocentric character of traditional history, creating a mistaken
impression of humankind as the only main protagonist on the stage of history. In the
light of the new situation, it is ever more significant to ask what would history be like if
it were regarded from the perspective not of humans, but of non-human species. This
question has been most forcefully phrased by advocates of animal history who desire to
study not only the relations between humans and animals in the past, but wish to study
history ‘from the viewpoint of animals’ (Baratay 2012). Such an approach obviously calls
for a reconsidering of the fundamentals of history as a discipline, or, as justly pointed out
by Ewa Domanska (2017: 271), the animal-historical perspective demands ‘a different
way of knowing the past from the one offered by historical epistemology with its specific
understanding of time, space, change, rationality, and causality’.
Side by side with animal history, another variant of ‘more-than-human history’,
namely ‘multispecies history’, has made its presence felt in the most recent times,
inspired by the ‘multispecies ethnography’ proposed by anthropologists (Kirksey and
Helmreich 2010; see also Pilaar Birch 2018 for ‘multispecies archaeology’). Multispecies
history is interested in how humans have become commingled in the past with small
organisms – microfauna and -flora – and how they form within temporally as well
as spatially dynamic ‘webs of interspecies dependence’ (Tsing 2012: 144; see also
O’Gorman 2017). Such an approach, of course, challenges the historians’ habitual way
of using their sources, demanding that attention be paid also ‘to the tracks and traces of
nonhumans’ since, even though non-human organisms ‘tell no tales’, ‘they contribute to
the overlapping tracks and traces that we grasp as history’. ‘History, then’, Anna Tsing
(2015: 168) concludes, ‘is the record of many trajectories of world making, human and
not human’.

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Debating New Approaches to History

The trends described here can be linked to the general ‘posthuman turn’ in
contemporary humanities. ‘Posthumanism’, as it has recently been written, ‘rejects
that humans are the only species capable of producing knowledge and instead
creates openings for other forms/things/objects/beings/phenomena to know. It also
problematizes distinctions that are drawn between and among species. This is significant
because when humans are decentred as the only possible knowers, a wealth of research
possibilities emerge’ (Ulmer 2017: 834). One of the trends that has emerged from among
these possibilities, is ‘posthumanist history’ (see Chapter 12) that will probably evolve
into an important new approach to history at the time of the Anthropocene.
But in the age of the Anthropocene, new importance and significance have become
attached to the environmental history that already evolved in the United States in the 1970s
(see Chapter 3). Having first emerged as a sub-branch of history, this trend has in recent
years spread all over the world and considerably expanded its grasp, becoming regarded
as a necessary part of the study of history as a whole. A few years ago, Kenneth Pomeranz
(2014: 351) could ask, ‘Is the principal goal [of environmental history] establishing a
separate, focused subfield (e.g. women’s history, ethnic histories, the histories of science
and technology) or integrating the new topic into “mainstream” narratives?’. Today, the
answer clearly seems to fall in favour of the latter. In the contemporary study of history, it
is no longer possible to discuss the environment as one of many other subject-matters or
as a mere neutral backdrop of human activities; instead, it must be regarded as a central
protagonist of the historical process which no historical study of any ambition can afford
to neglect.

History in the digital age

While in ecological terms, we live in the age of Man, in technological terms we are
inhabitants of the digital age. The changed attitudes to time and space reviewed above,
as well as the rapid growth of man’s ecological footprint, are indeed all, in one way or
another, linked to the rapid development of digital technology. Globalization would
never have acquired its present importance, had it not been supported by technological
advances, primarily the rapid dissemination of digital means of communication. Manuel
Castells (2008: 24–5) has plausibly written that ‘the forces driving globalization could
only be effectuated because they have at their disposal the global networking capacity
provided by digital communication technologies and information systems, including
computerized, long-haul, fast, transportation networks’.
In more than one sense, the World Wide Web is a symbol of our age, and without
much exaggeration it can be said that ‘mass adoption of the Internet is driving one of the
most exciting social, cultural, and political transformations in history, and unlike earlier
periods of change, this time the effects are fully global’ (Schmidt and Cohen 2013: 4).
The rise of the internet and digital communication has also marked an important change
in our knowledge system, the third major revolution since the invention of writing and
printing. This has brought along new debates about the birth of a ‘knowledge society’ or

8
 Introduction

‘information age’, which, in turn, have encouraged an historical approach to the topic –
the emergence of the history of knowledge (Burke 2016: 4–5; see Chapter 6).
The development of technology and media has always influenced cultural attitudes
and shaped our relations with the past (Kittler 1999; Anderson 2011). Having spread
extensively all over the world in but a few decades, digital technology has forcefully
reshaped our relationship with the past, as well as the ways and means of studying the
past; and it is quite safe to say that these developments will only intensify in the future
(Weller 2013). The ever more extensive digitization of source materials, coupled with new
and increasingly web-based tools and methods to process and analyse these materials,
have opened completely new prospects to historians and forced them to rethink the
fundamentals of their profession (see Chapter 10).
In the interest of clarity, however, a distinction must be made between two phenomena:
history in a digital age and digital history. In a sense, all historians are digital historians
nowadays, since we all use the means supplied by digital technology, be it the internet or
programmes for text processing. Let alone the general digitization of historical culture:
from history-themed computer games to historical virtual reality experiences (Fogu
2009). Digital history in the narrower sense, however, should still be taken to signify an
approach to history that uses digital technology in researching and representing the past.
In an online discussion hosted by the Journal of American History, Douglas Seefeldt and
William G. Thomas (2009) have offered a definition of digital history that still seems to
be the most suitable:

Digital history might be understood broadly as an approach to examining and

representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the
computer, the internet network, and software systems. On one level, digital history
is an open arena of scholarly production and communication, encompassing
the development of new course materials and scholarly data collection efforts.
On another level, digital history is a methodological approach framed by the
hypertextual power of these technologies to make, define, query, and annotate
associations in the human record of the past.

Thus, digital history is to be conceived not as history’s new ancillary, but as a new way
of studying and writing history. From the viewpoint of research work, historians must
get used to a new situation described by Roy Rosenzweig (2011: 7) as ‘a fundamental
paradigm shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance’. The massive
digitization of sources and the ever new opportunities offered by quantitative analysis
confront historians with the question of how the new situation will modify the current
understanding of a ‘historical source’. What are the consequences of ‘sources’ becoming
‘(big) data’? If the nature of historical sources changes, how does that affect our methods
of analysis? In what ways does the balance between researcher and machine shift, and
how can we integrate, for instance, close and distant reading? (Zaagzma 2013: 19). Like
the general evolution of digital humanities (Berry and Fagerjord 2017), digital history
has passed from stage 1.0 to that of 2.0 over the last years. While digital history 1.0,

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Debating New Approaches to History

carried away by a general enthusiasm for computers and digital technology, was oriented
mostly to the creation of data bases and to quantitative analysis, digital history 2.0 places
increasingly greater emphasis on the need for a qualitative and critical analysis, as well as
a more active involvement of users (Noiret 2013). As the initial technological enthusiasm
died down, new techniques of visualization and data analysis have begun to emerge,
allowing again for more attention to be paid to the conventional methodological strengths
of humanitarian research: ‘attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context,
analytical depth, critique and interpretation’ (Schnapp and Presner 2009).
The ‘digital turn’ challenges not only the study of the past, but also the ways of
representing it. Digital environment liberates historians from the obligation of using a
linear narrative, online historical writing enables them to create intermedial hypertexts
and virtual historical realities, with every user choosing the path suited for him/her.
Chiel Van den Akker (2013: 111) recently proposed a convenient typology to distinguish
between the historians’ narratives in the analogue versus the digital age:

Old narrative New (online) narrative

Book, article, review Enriched publication, wiki, blog, exhibition

Monographic Collaborative, participatory, interactive

Linear Non-linear, hypertextual

Panoramic Collage

Writing and reading Direct communication

Online history writing supports the users’ active participation in the creation of
knowledge, it enables historians to develop collaborative and participatory projects of
historical research on the internet, which in the future will certainly have an impact
on how history writing will be conceived. This participatory online culture, as Ann
Rigney (2010: 111) has justly underscored, ‘is not only creating new conditions for the
production of narratives about the past but also new challenges for conceptualization’.
True enough, online history narratives are nothing unheard of, and their future is
not all sunny. Almost twenty years ago Edward Ayers (1999: 1) wrote that ‘the new
technologies seem tailor-made for history, a match for the growing bulk and complexity
of our ever more self-conscious practice, efficient vehicles to connect with larger
and more diverse audiences’. From that period, likewise come the first more original
attempts at online historical writing, such as Robert Darnton’s (2000) electronic essay
on the information networks of eighteenth-century Paris which integrated different
media (texts, images, sounds). As president of the American Historical Association,
Darnton also belonged among the historians who, in the early 2000s, contributed
enthusiastically to the development of the electronic publishing of historical research yet
realized, only a few years later, that ‘the triumphalist enthusiasm from the early stages
of experimentation with electronic publishing has evaporated, and we now are dealing
with workable projects’ (Tamm 2004). The Achilles’ heel of electronic publishing and

10
 Introduction

online history writing is still the problem of preservation. Just as Darnton’s electronic
essay of 2000 has disappeared from the internet, so many other innovative digital history
projects of the 2000s have also gone down the drain. Whereas the traditional medium
of printing has been able to support scientific communication successfully for several
centuries, the digital medium as yet remains ephemeral, and as long as it is impossible
to guarantee its longevity, there is no reason to think that digital history writing could
replace earlier forms of historiography. Thus, ‘digital history’ should first and foremost
be conceived of as a transitional term that has helped raise new important questions and
led historians to acquire new technical skills. In a longer perspective, however, it is likely
that ‘there will be no more talk of “digital history” as all history is somehow “digital” in
terms of incorporation of new types of sources, methods and ways of dissemination (just
as all humanities will be inherently “digital”)’ (Zaagsma 2013: 16).

Beyond words

An important part of the historical innovation of the last decades of the last century had,
as their starting point, the ‘linguistic turn’ – a realization that language not merely reflects
the reality but actively creates it. In the present century, on the contrary, historians have
rather desired to escape from ‘the prison-house of language’, to move beyond discourse,
out of the labyrinths of text. Explanations are expected to come forth from things rather
than words. This desire found its clearest expression in the new and growing interest
for materiality, visuality, and corporeality, which in turn has been influenced by deeper
social and cultural trends. The French philosopher Tristan Garcia (2014: 1) has recently
observed that ‘our time is perhaps the time of an epidemic of things’. In his view, it is
not so much our relations with things that need to be rethought, as the nature of things
themselves and their impact on us.
It is a generally accepted fact that Western culture has grown increasingly visual over
the last decades, but it is equally important to notice the transformation of the role that
images play in culture: images are no longer seen as abstract and passive but concrete
and performative, they are characterized by a certain agency, which is why the central
question of visual studies is no longer what the images mean, but what the images want
(Mitchell 2005). Bruno Latour (1993) and Alfred Gell (1998) were among the first to
begin to speak about the agency of things and images; by now, however, the notion
that ‘objects not only are the product of history, they are also active agents in history’
(Auslander 2005: 1017) has taken root ever more extensively among historians, too,
particularly in the sphere of the history of things (see Chapter 8) and visual culture (see
Chapter 9).
The return of the body into humanitarian debates goes back to the 1970s, and ‘the
history of the body’ has been an important avenue in historical studies (e.g. Porter 1991;
2001; Corbin, Courtine, and Vigarello 2004–2006). Nevertheless, up to very recent times,
the body has been a metaphor rather than matter for historians; a cultural rather than
physical phenomenon. Under the rubric of history of the body, various discourses about

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Debating New Approaches to History

or perspectives on the body have usually been studied; it is rather the semantics than the
pragmatics of the body that have been highlighted. ‘For by entering the realm of meaning,
the body’s physical reality is still left out’ was the critical observation of Annemarie Mol
(2002: 11), who has proposed a new approach that she calls ‘praxiography’, focusing
on the historical study of body practices. Bodies, things, and techniques are no longer
treated as silent objects but as important actors. ‘In this way, praxiography might offer
historians of the body an interesting method to study the physical body as an actor in
history, by analysing the “actions” of bodies, techniques, materials, and sites in practice
instead of historical representations’ (Clever and Ruberg 2014: 554).
Behind that new approach there is a broader trend that could be called a new
meeting of history and biology. While the ‘linguistic turn’ preferred mind over matter,
soul over body, and culture over nature, by now these distinctions are fading and the
world is increasingly seen as a hybrid phenomenon, in terms of assemblage rather than
of antagonism. ‘There is not much culture without biology’, Daniel Lord Smail (2008:
154) laconically states, seconded by Julia Adeney Thomas (2014: 1587): ‘in the age of
the Anthropocene, history and biology seem to converge’. The nature/culture debate
has been supplanted in recent years by bioculture (Davis and Morris 2007; McGrath
2017) and the mind/body dilemma redefined by the ‘extended mind’ and ‘embodied
cognition’ (Menary 2010; Shapiro 2014). Yet in their introduction to the round table
‘History Meets Biology’ in the American Historical Review, the authors justly point out
that the collaboration of history and biology (and, in fact, of other sciences) is not a one-
way street and that historians need to preserve their critical attitude:

The challenge for historians is to come to grips with these biological discoveries
while recognizing that historians have an ever more important role to play in an era
when biology holds sway: as critics of the tendency of science to universalize and
decontextualize human behavior; as discoverers of patterns in human behavior
and changes in human bodies that can reshape scientific thought and redirect
scientific research; and as champions of history as a humanistic mode of inquiry.
(AHR Roundtable 2014: 1499)

While in the evolution of the history of the body, the contribution of women and
gender history played a key role, the novel interest in the ‘real’ bodies and things has
made it possible to expand the ‘questionnaire’ of gender history (see Chapter 4), but
also challenged its main distinctions (including sex and gender) (Downs 2010). The
‘material turn’ has helped us understand the great importance of things in shaping
and constructing gender identities; even though gender roles are undoubtedly also
defined by language use, it is important to notice how gender relations operate through
material objects (Kirkham 1996; Greig, Hamlett, and Hannan 2016). In the long history
of humankind, gender identities have been expressed not just through speech acts
and conceptual categories, but through textiles, timber, metal, images, rituals, dance,
music, and so on. Leora Auslander (2005: 1019) has written, rising to a suggestive level
of generalization:

12
 Introduction

Human beings need things to individuate, differentiate, and identify; human

beings need things to express and communicate the unsaid and the unsayable;
human beings need things to situate themselves in space and time, as extensions of
the body (and to compensate for the body’s limits), as well as for sensory pleasure;
human beings need objects to effectively remember and forget; and we need
objects to cope with absence, with loss, and with death.

The addressing of things and matter has, at the same time, meant moving away from
anthropocentrism; things do not necessarily acquire their meaning through humans, just
like the impact of things on humans may be no less than that of humans on things. More
radical thinkers have, in connection with this, spoken about ‘object-oriented democracy’,
in which ‘subaltern things will be liberated from the humanist rule of subject-centered
discourse’ (Trentmann 2009: 284). This philosophical trend, that has won renown under
the name of new materialism, emphasizes that humans and things are fundamentally co-
constitutive, to the point that distinctions between them have not only become blurred
but actually can no longer be sustained at all (LeCain 2017). ‘New materialists further
suggest’, writes Sonia Hazard (2013: 67), ‘that we, as ostensible humans, are protean
assemblages of things, human and non-human, as well. The mass of matter that is the
human body – its brain and nervous system, bones and organs – is never sealed off from
the external world, but continually intermingles with food, air, metal plates, microbes,
and other things without which it could not live.’
Thus, the materialist perspective goes hand in hand with a reassessment of
corporeality. Our perceptions and feelings have a material background and involve both
human and non-human actors. ‘Sounds, for example, are external vibrations resounding
in the ear. Smells are nonhuman particles entering the nose. Emotions like sadness or
joy are inextricable from their porous physiology, relating to chemicals in the blood and
excitations of the nerves’ (Hazard 2013: 68). Integrated with neurosciences, this approach
has opened new prospects for studying the history of emotions (see Chapter 7), as well
as laid the foundations for the research field of neurohistory (see Chapter 11). It is no
longer the classical problem of ‘how it really was’ that is put forward, but also ‘what it
was like’ in the past (Hunt 2009). Whereas only a few decades ago, one of the influential
bywords in historical studies said ‘history from below’, it is now ‘history from within’ that
has risen to the status of the new catchphrase (Burman 2012). Even though collaboration
with neurosciences is complicated for historians, with these sciences being in constant
flux and the ideas held at any one point rapidly getting discarded a few years later,
cooperation should nevertheless not be avoided; instead, the ideas of neuroscientists
ought to be taken as inspiring input, not as categorical arguments (Mandressi 2011;
Becker 2012; cf. Kleinberg 2016).

13
Debating New Approaches to History

Debating history today: The rationale of the volume

The study of history has undergone several changes in the present century; new research
fields, new subjects, new epistemological platforms have emerged. While the 1990s were
still dominated by talk about a ‘crisis’ of history (Scott 1989; Noiriel 1996; Fahrmeir
2003), the new century has seen a return of optimism, with more and more opportunities
looming on the horizon. When the French historian and publisher Pierre Nora founded
a new intellectual journal called Le Débat, in 1980, he justified its name in the first issue
with the words, ‘Le débat, parce qu’il n’y en a pas’ (‘The debate, because there no longer
is any’). The present volume also partly owes its inception to the realization that debating
the new developments might be more interesting than presenting a triumphant narrative
of the consecutive conquests achieved by the study of history in the new century. We are
convinced that in any field of academic study, the boldness and intensity of debate over
the foundations and perspectives of research bears witness to the vitality of the field.
Starting from this realization, we as the editors compiled a list of some novel
approaches to history that we wished to include in our volume (there is hopefully no
need to emphasize that the list makes no pretence at being exhaustive) and asked each
contributor to tackle the key problems and challenges he or she was willing to address
within that particular field of history. However, the aim of the enterprise was not just
to provide a useful overview of the new approaches to history, but also to offer insights
into current historical debates, into the process of historical method in the making.
Therefore, each chapter is followed by critical comments written by another specialist
in the same field, offering some alternative and/or complementary perspectives to the
topic. The chapter is concluded, in turn, by the author’s short reply to the commentator.
Though this certainly doesn’t result in an all-encompassing portrait of the current
approaches to history and the controversies that surround these, we believe that it
does help to clarify key points of tension and multiple visions of a rapidly changing
historiographical landscape.
We hope that the innovative format of the book, somewhat inspired by the collaborative
volume Key Debates in Anthropology edited by Tim Ingold (1996) will, better than
any other, help the readers get an idea of the main themes dominating contemporary
historical thought and enable them to understand the problems currently at the top
of the theoretical and methodological agenda in historical studies. While our goal has
been to provide a comprehensive companion to contemporary history writing, we have
deliberately set some important limits to the temporal and spatial reach of the volume.
In temporal terms, we decided to focus on the developments in historical research since
about the 1990s (taking also into account the fact that the previous enterprise of a similar
kind, New Perspectives on Historical Writing, edited by Peter Burke, was published in
1991). In spatial terms, we opted to focus mostly on the new approaches in Western
history writing, while encouraging our contributors to include as much comparative
and global perspective in their texts as possible. We are very happy to have been able to
bring together a truly international collective of authors, from more than ten countries
and several generations, allowing us to hope that our volume will be able to offer a

14
 Introduction

sufficiently representative cross-section of all the various traditions of history writing in

the modern Western world.1

Note

1. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Peter Burke for his careful reading of the first version
of the introduction. Work on this chapter as well as on the volume was supported by the
Estonian Research Council grant IUT18–8.

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20
CHAPTER 1
GLOBAL HISTORY
Jürgen Osterhammel

There was a time when programmatic reflections on what global history was supposed to
be seemed to outnumber attempts to put all those ambitious recipes into historiographical
practice. Today the situation has changed. A solid body of work is available not only to
demonstrate the strengths and virtues of global history but also to expose its difficulties
and its fragility. The present stage of semi-consolidation of the field is a propitious time
to attempt a survey, with special emphasis on debates and open questions.
Yet the dramatic expansion of global history does not really facilitate such a task. At
the moment, the most diverse kinds of historical writing dress up as ‘global’, sharing
nothing but a vague resolve to overcome national history and Eurocentrism – two
bogeys whose despicability is too often taken for granted. Adopting a strictly nominalist
view and abstaining from any kind of value judgement, one might austerely catalogue
and classify these practices. In this sense, global history is what people choose to call
by that name. While pursuing, up to a certain point, such a track of historicization,
the present chapter will not entirely avoid normative issues. An intellectual field loses
shape and coherence when it abandons the quest for a consensual minimum of shared
methodological requirements. Debates, apart from their usual side-purpose of jockeying
for academic power and influence, ought to serve a search for such common standards.

Success and its perils

The extraordinary ambition to practice history writing on a grander scale than usual
invests the rise and future fate of global history with uncommon drama. Can this
ambition be sustained? Are wide-ranging programmatic visions matched by historical
analyses that convince the experts as well as a wider public? Is it possible to embed rare
virtuoso performances by experienced historians within broader routines of research
carried out in monographic projects by scholars in the early stages of their careers? How
closely does global history reflect ongoing ‘globalisation’ in the real world? Do crises in
that real-world globalization – the resilience and re-emergence of nationalist politics and
mentalities, the upsurge of inter-religious conflict, a partial disintegration of the world
economy – weaken the intellectual foundations and the credibility of global history?
The present chapter does not offer answers to all these questions. It starts out from
the premise that global history, so far, has proved an ambivalent success. While it has
attracted much attention and enthusiasm and has produced an impressive library
of outstanding work, in many ways it remains a field in search of itself. It would be
Debating New Approaches to History

premature to celebrate global history as the one historiographical perspective most

suitable for our time and the global historian as the avatar of the present age. Such naive
and self-serving avantgardism seems to be out of place. The primacy of a global approach
in academic historiography, in school curricula, and in the public marketplace is far from
assured, and global historians should take seriously the warning by one of the greatest of
world historians, the late Sir Christopher Bayly (2011: 13), ‘that evolutionary nationalist
historicism remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dominant form of
historical understanding across much of the world’.
Global history emerged, along with a more modestly conceived ‘transnational’
history, in the 1990s as one among several new fields that arose in a general atmosphere
of an epochal break. This was the heyday of ‘post’-discourses: postmodernism, post-
structuralism, and postcolonialism. Still, global history, by its very nature, occupied
a special place and evolved under unique circumstances. Other sub-disciplines of
historical studies emerged in the course of the differentiation and division of labour
that is to be expected from expanding fields of scientific knowledge. Some of them were
launched through carefully orchestrated ‘turns’. Sometimes emergent fields caught on
and solidified into self-sustaining discourses, in other cases they failed to develop the
way their proponents envisaged.
Global history evokes a more complex and contradictory image. In the shape of ‘world
history’, understood as a trans-tribal reflection on the past that reaches out beyond one’s
own polity, social group, or religious community, it has an old pedigree going back
to the beginnings of historiography (Subrahmanyam 2014). At the same time, global
history represents a mere intra-academic development to a lesser degree than other sub-
disciplines. World histories have always appealed to a wider public and have exuded
an aura of grandeur and importance. With the rise of scientifically minded historical
studies since the time of Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke they lost their
academic reputation and were banished to a shadowy world of irresponsible speculation,
nevertheless continuing to cater to a considerable public demand. Such a bifurcation
between popularity and respectability was still evident in the worldwide fame of Arnold
J. Toynbee who, towards the end of his life, was probably the best-known historian on
the planet while few academic historians – for several reasons, not all of them justified –
took him seriously any more.
It is one of the major achievements of the ‘new’ global history to have bridged the
gap between the narrowly specializing professional and the generalist amateur. But
the gap has not entirely disappeared, and global historians, more than anyone else,
continue to be torn between the expectations of different audiences and constituencies.
The recent rise of global history cannot be explained by reference to its intrinsic merits
alone. It would have been impossible without the active support and commercial
interest of publishers who opened their lists for monographs, textbooks, multi-volume
works, book series, and new journals that only a few years before would have kindled
much less enthusiasm. Popular and academic global history and world history have
grown in a kind of interactive co-evolution within the parameters of academia and the
culture industry.

22
 Global History

This solid and sustained growth cannot disguise the fact that global/world history
always verges on the impossible. Although global historians almost unanimously reject
the view that they are in charge of everything, this is exactly what the public demands of
them. And, indeed, in a media-conscious age the temptation can be hard to resist – and
not entirely without reason. Even if it would be a vulgar misunderstanding to think that
world historians aim at knowing everything, they still have to know an extraordinary
amount. Since they always have to keep a great number of people, places, periods, and
systematic aspects in mind, they are often condemned to patchy and superficial coverage.
It is easy for any regional specialist to fault the world historian on points of detail. Not
even the greatest masters of world history are exempt from Edward Gibbon’s verdict on
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the outstanding polymath of early modern Europe: ‘Even his
powers were dissipated by the multiplicity of his pursuits’ (Gibbon 1972: 401). No other
sub-discipline of historiography is to a similar degree endangered by hubris. None has a
greater responsibility towards a non-expert reading public. The larger the generalizations
offered by historians, the more these generalizations have to be taken on trust.
The rise of global history has been geographically uneven. Focusing exclusively
on historiographical developments in the English-speaking world tends to distort the
picture and to undermine the cosmopolitan credentials and aspirations of global history.
If its subject matter is ‘globality’ in all its many facets, then its inherent universality
deserves to be taken seriously. It is undoubtedly true that historians in Britain and the
United States have been at the forefront of the new global history and that English is
the only common language shared by the global history community. Many global
historians in non-Anglophone countries prefer to publish in English; everywhere in the
world a book under contract with one of the most prestigious university presses or trade
publishers in the United Kingdom or the United States is regarded as the pinnacle of a
global historian’s achievement.
Even so, there are considerable communities of world historians in a number of
non-Anglophone countries, and rich literatures in languages such as Japanese, Chinese,
Spanish, French, and German deserve a place in the overall picture. One of the best
surveys of world and global history has never been translated from its original Italian (Di
Fiore and Meriggi 2011). The enormous influence of a small number of canonical British,
US-American or Indian authors whose works have been translated into numerous
languages does not mean that writings in a global history mode form a discourse of
seamless universality. Locally specific traditions of world history writing have not been
completely erased just as the particular kind and degree of institutionalization of global
history varies enormously (Stuchtey and Fuchs 2003; Sachsenmaier 2011; Inglebert 2014).
Is it the rule or rather the exception for history departments to include at least one
position in global history? Is global history merely regarded as a pedagogical necessity
or does it include a research perspective? Do universities offer the broad range of
supporting area studies and language tuition facilities that is indispensable for providing
global history with a firm empirical basis? Do young scholars receive career incentives to
take up global history topics? Is global history taught at secondary schools and colleges
and are universities involved in training the respective teachers? For many countries

23
Debating New Approaches to History

the answers to these questions are likely to be in the negative or carefully hedged. Only
a precise mapping of global history activities around the globe would provide clear
answers and identify trends over time. Such a mapping is likely to reveal highly uneven
development, distinctions between centres and peripheries and sometimes stagnation
and reversal.

Paths towards global history

There are three different narratives to account for the growth of global history. All three
are basically plausible or even accurate but they have to be combined in making sense of
specific trajectories.
Story number one sees the new global history of the 1990s and after as just the latest
among several universalist episodes in the history of historical thought and writing.
According to this view, global history continues a long tradition of world history or
general history which can be found, above all, in Europe, China, and the Islamicate
civilization. Before the discovery and early colonial settlement of Australia in the late
eighteenth century, such world history did not encompass the entire globe. Rather, the
intermittent resurgences of world history should be seen as attempts to arrive at the
largest picture possible under the practical and cognitive constraints of a given time.
In this sense, it is legitimate to speak of Herodotus, Sima Qian, or Ibn Khaldūn as
world historians within the paradigm of their respective epochs. Following this line of
reasoning the new global history builds on precursors in the eighteenth century (Voltaire
in France, William Robertson in Scotland, or August Ludwig Schlözer in Germany) and
also stands in some sort of uneasy genealogical relationship to universalist approaches in
the early twentieth century as diverse as Max Weber’s cross-cultural comparisons, Eduard
Meyer’s comprehensive history of the ancient world, or Marxist theories of imperialism.
Chinese world history, to give a second example, could build on the historiography of
the eighteenth-century Qing empire that was diverse enough to include a plurality of
historical experiences within a vast multi-ethnic imperial system. Global history, on
this reading, belongs to a longer development of ‘transnational challenges to national
history writing’ (Middell and Roura 2013). Formally speaking, the entire history of
historiography might be construed on the model of the antagonism between Thucydides
and Herodotus, as a see-saw between the local and the universal, the micro view and
the macro perspective: a tension that will never disappear but is now being eased in
scholarly practice by a new global microhistory (e.g., Andrade 2010; Ghobrial 2014).
Story number one sounds somewhat antiquarian: It establishes an impressive
pedigree for global history but one that is of limited consequence for the practice of
global historians today. Story two, by contrast, is set within a radically shorter time
span: it sees global history as the third step in a progressive sequence of historiography’s
advance since the 1960s. Social history was the dominant and most exciting tendency in
the 1960s and 1970s, followed by cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s which in turn
was succeeded and superseded by global history from the late 1990s onwards. If served

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 Global History

without the necessary pinch of salt, this self-historicization easily takes on the flavour of
a teleological ‘Whig history’ of unbroken progress. Social and cultural history serve as
mere forerunners of a triumphant global history.
Thinking in terms of such neatly demarcated ‘paradigms’ imposes welcome order on
an extremely complex historiographical landscape and energizes the frontier spirit of
those who see themselves in the vanguard on the march towards intellectual hegemony.
At the same time, it may occlude the extent to which global history profits from those
earlier innovations and inherits their methodological achievements. In contrast to story
number one, this alternative narrative considers global history resolutely as a stage –
certainly not the ultimate one – in the post-1945 modernization of historical studies. It
gains in persuasiveness when it also acknowledges semi-autonomous developments in
the various regional historiographies. Until around 1950 or even 1960 empirical world
histories – as distinct from philosophical constructions of history – were condemned to
some sort of Eurocentric bias. Not enough was known about many parts of the world.
Only a huge burst of effort and creativity since about 1960, documented above all in the
numerous Cambridge Histories (including the Cambridge World History of 2015) that
now cover virtually every corner of the globe, laid the foundations for the work that
has since been accomplished by global historians. The structural antagonism between
area studies and global history, probably more pronounced in the United States than
anywhere else, should not conceal the fact that global history is greatly indebted to
region-based research and in more than one way dependent on it.
Finally, story number three connects the rise of global history to that of globalization
studies in the social sciences. Not counting a few early swallows, these studies really took
off in the early 1990s: after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the Soviet Union, after the
invasion of everyday life – and the working habits of scholars – by the internet, and after
the incipient emergence of parts of Asia, above all China, from Third World poverty and
economic stagnation (Selchow 2017). The optimistic 1990s, when visions of a glorious
‘global age’ proliferated, were the decade when the foundational texts of globalization
theory were written by sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists.
Global history, this narrative maintains, was the large-scale application of this kind of
theory to the past: network theories, world society theory, world system theory (dating
back already to the 1970s), theories of communication, of identity, hybridity, and cultural
encounter, of motion, flows and circulation, and so on. The crucial point about this
interpretation is the contention that the new global history signifies a deep break with
the historiographical past. It owed its existence to the theoretical innovations of the
1990s from Anthony Giddens via Arjun Appadurai to Manuel Castells and thus has no
filiations back to older traditions. But it is derivative and dependent on theoretical inputs
from outside the discipline. Since globalization theory has engendered a huge literature
and has passed through numerous fashions and metamorphoses that historians rarely
have the time and energy to study with the necessary comprehensiveness and care,
global history has relaxed its ties to social theory and has developed its own somewhat
simplified idiom (Osterhammel 2016). According to this narrative, global history
is not necessarily identical with the history of ‘globalisation’ but owes its intellectual

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Debating New Approaches to History

foundations to theories of globalization, even if their practical relevance for historians

may have declined in recent years.
The third story is intuitively perhaps the most convincing of the three. Just as
sociologists and political scientists reacted to experiences of the end of international
bipolarity, the annihilation of time and space through digital communication, or the
explosive rise of China, so did historians. But in placing developments in historiography
squarely in the context of present-day concerns, story number three misses something
important. Global history has, in an eclectic way that is fully legitimate, absorbed impulses
not just from the social sciences but also from the innovative social and cultural history
of the post-war decades. It can also fruitfully be seen as a revitalization of Enlightenment
thinking that highlighted cultural relativity, tolerance, and the moral unity of the human
species. Thus, each of the three narratives contains a kernel of truth.

Varieties of large-scale history

So far, it has been left deliberately vague what global history is after all. This vagueness
reflects common practice. Numerous suggestions have been made to distinguish
between various forms of large-scale history. It is astonishing that they have not caught
on. There is plenty of evidence of a semantic confusion to which very few people seem
to object. Especially in the English-speaking literature ‘world history’ and ‘global
history’ are often treated as synonyms. The Journal of World History and the Journal
of Global History carry the same type of article without any visible attempt at mutual
differentiation. Multi-volume series such as the Cambridge World History (Wiesner-
Hanks 2015) or A History of the World published by Harvard University Press (Iriye and
Osterhammel 2012) commit themselves to ‘world history’ as the more comprehensive
concept, basically meaning a ‘general’ history of socially organized human life on earth
since the beginnings of archaeological evidence. Many chapters in those works, however,
employ a decidedly ‘global’ perspective that looks for lateral connections.
The picture is further confused by the intrusion of ‘Big History’ into the realm of
world history (Christian 2004; Hesketh 2014); it is sometimes even seen as identical
with global history (Clavin 2005: 436). Popular audiences these days expect speakers
who are being introduced as ‘global historians’ to be knowledgeable about the Big
Bang and anything that resulted from it. Big History evidently satisfies a need for the
largest possible picture that used to be traditionally met by religion and theology. Made
popular by the French priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin long before the
term ‘Big History’ was coined and rose to prominence in the United States, the issue of
the position of life in the long-term evolution of the cosmos has long since fascinated
reading audiences. It stretches the competence of conventionally trained historians
who lack sufficient expertise in astrophysics and the theory of biological evolution. Big
History is an interdisciplinary subfield of its own and will not be considered further in
this chapter. Still, its obvious popularity cannot be ignored. When professional global
historians prefer to leave it to a small group of devotees the reason is only partly a

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 Global History

lack of competence and a distrust of generalizations that are not based on sources. In
addition, such a quasi-metaphysical approach distracts from the mundane concerns of
the politically conscious citizen and is liable to lead to a de-politicization of history.
What kind of relevant insight do we gain from a contemplation of billions of years?
In spite of early initiatives by Bruce Mazlish and others (Mazlish and Buultjens 1993),
there has hardly ever been a true debate among world historians about finer points of
the internal classification and mapping of the field. While this neglect has blurred the
contours of the historiographical landscape and allowed anyone with the necessary
self-confidence to claim credentials as a global historian, it may have contributed to the
new sub-discipline’s success. Struggles for and against old and new orthodoxies have
been avoided, in-fighting has been reduced to an unusual minimum. The policing of the
epistemic boundaries has been laissez-faire and almost negligent, sparing us discussion
about the purity and contamination of doctrine. Everybody can claim to be a world
historian. This comes at the price of indeterminate criteria of judgement. To this day,
there is no widely shared consensus about the standards for successful world history
writing. This absence is not just a problem for intra-academic tasks such as assessing
students, reviewing books, and evaluating manuscripts or applications. Criteria are also
needed for keeping a distance from a kind of popular world history that may be deeply
influential in society but often shades off into unsupported speculation and fantasy.
A simple attempt to circumscribe, or even define, the terms most commonly used
might look like this:
Universal history is a philosophically or theologically informed and vaguely fact-based
reflection on major dynamic patterns and regularities in the development of humanity
over extended periods of time (Inglebert 2014). It is often based on the assumption that
history is a unified, though internally differentiated process with a clear origin and a
discernible goal. For the twentieth century, Karl Jaspers’s book title The Origin and Goal
of History (German original: 1949) expresses this programme succinctly (Jaspers 1953).
It is closely connected to theories of long-term societal evolution (Sanderson 2014).
This kind of discourse is the domain of philosophers and sociologists (Gellner 1988);
professional historians tend to avoid it (but see Cook 2003).
World history is the study of human communities – often but not exclusively
conceptualized as large-scale ‘civilizations’ integrated by religious belief systems and
basic social practices (Eisenstadt 2001) – and their social and cultural creativity in
different ecological settings, putting additional emphasis on contacts between those
communities (an excellent example is Vanhaute 2013). It is usually based on the – more
or less implicit – assumption that ‘globality’ is not constituted by real cross-boundary
activities of a ‘networking’ type but through the existence of a limited number of general
challenges to which the various communities find answers varying in space, time, and
societal framing. These answers can be meaningfully compared to each other, making
comparison – at various levels of explication and formality of design – a preferred tool
of world historians. In contrast to universal history, world history puts a premium on
difference and rejects holistic concepts such as ‘mankind’, ‘humanity’, ‘world society’,
or ‘world system’. Whereas global history treats mobility and boundary-transgressing

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Debating New Approaches to History

connectivity as primordial phenomena, world history focuses on the internal dynamics

of communities and societies. During the nineteenth century and at least up to Arnold
J. Toynbee’s deliberately ecumenical work of the 1930s, world history used to follow the
master trope of the ‘rise of the West’. This Eurocentrism lingers on but is now widely
considered a problem and seldom defended on grounds of principle.
Transnational history has not evolved from traditions of world history and is not
predicated on any notion of ‘globality’ or a closed world system. It rather is a refining
extension of the insight that territorial states (with the modern nation state as a special
articulation of the territorial state) are embedded in wider contexts. This embedding
takes place at different levels. Where the leading actors are governments wielding the
tools of diplomacy, military force, and managed economic relations (‘mercantilism’),
we are at the level of international relations revolving around power, war, and peace.
Whenever societal actors are involved, relations are transnational. They assume the form
of ‘entanglements’ of varying intensity and stability. Entanglement frequently occurs
between spatially contiguous societies but also between imperial metropoles and their
distant colonies (Margolin and Markovits 2015; Lowe 2015). A more attenuated form
than a dense histoire croisée (Werner and Zimmermann 2006) is the histoire connectée
that also looks for first traces of emerging contacts (Subrahmanyam 1997; Gruzinski
2012). Transnational history exposes myths of purity and autonomy while emphasizing
the persistent relevance of borders and boundaries. It aims at ‘a history with nations that
is not a history of nations’ (Saunier 2013: 8).
Global history is a perspective for considering all kinds of cross-border mobilities
and their consequences, especially within vast and multicultural spaces; it focuses on
connections and connectivity (or connectedness), with special attention to empirical
connections that are uneven and have a transformative impact on the interconnected
social and cultural units (Belich, Darwin, and Wickham 2016). From the point of
view of a given social or political unit, global history is less interested in endogenous
dynamics (as world history is) than in forces impacting from the outside. At a systemic
level (which is absent from transnational history) it makes two assumptions. Firstly, it
ascribes separate agency to actors operating at that level and ‘causal relevance’ to ‘factors
that do not lie within the purview of individuals, nations, and civilisations’ (Conrad
2016: 89). Secondly, even if most global historians do not invoke and need such a strong
assumption in their daily practice, leading theorists of global history assert a long-term
world historical process that bundles and aligns the colourful chaos of relations and
connections in the direction of increasing global integration (Conrad 2016: 102). In this
sense, global history shows a closer affinity to universal history with its inbuilt teleology
than do world history and transnational history.
My own preference, though not supported by a broad consensus among scholars,
would be to leave global history more loosely defined as a history of transformative
connections and reserve the pointed requirement of integration for the history of
globalisation. This should be seen as a subfield of global history concerned with the
construction of institutionalized and robust networks of planetary extension that jointly,
though not without contradictions, contribute to a progressive integration of societies,

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 Global History

states, and cultural arenas on the globe, especially since the technological advances of the
mid-nineteenth century (Conrad 2016: 92–100; for a critical position see Lang 2014).
This typology helps to gain a contrastive understanding of the characteristic features
of global history. Global history, as the term is used here in a fairly narrow way, is one
among several types of large-scale history. It presupposes a direction in history that is
vaguely described with terms such as ‘integration’, ‘convergence’, and ‘homogenization’,
moving in a dialectical rather than a continuous and steady way. Additional a priori
assumptions about the overall shape of history are not required. Whereas universal
history – and, even more so, Big History – has long time spans in view, world history
is a history of human societies since the earliest palaeontological and archaeological
evidence, and transnational history limits itself to the last 200 to 250 years, global history
does not have to be long-term history. The temporalities used by global historians do
not derive from a given epistemological programme but are freely chosen according
to specific purposes of investigation. Few global historians are likely to go further back
than c. 1500, although exciting new work has been done on the global significance of
that caesura (Gruzinski 2004; Boucheron 2009). However, very few research-based
studies cover several centuries. Analyses of complex connections such as migrations,
commodity chains or the transfer of ideas between different civilizational contexts have
been most effective whenever they have dealt with shorter periods.
Since its key feature is the focus on connections, global history, in contrast to
simplistic but widespread forms of world history, is never merely additive and mosaic-
like. It is never content with the collection of anecdotes, isolated data, and distinct
regional case studies. Global history has been most persuasive when it managed to
discover hidden or unexpected connections that presented familiar phenomena in a new
light. Typically, aspects of a national history, sometimes graced by claims to uniqueness
and exceptionality, were shown to be influenced by external factors or to form part of
larger historical trends (here global history overlaps with comparative world history).
These detective-like qualities have contributed strongly to the attractiveness of a global
approach. It does not just ‘widen’ the picture, as is usually thought, but deepens it by
uncovering background factors. Seeing familiar things in a new light and understanding
the constructed nature and variability of temporal horizons and spatial framings is the
central pedagogical purpose of global history (Pomeranz 2014: 19; Grataloup 2011: 131–
74). In this sense it is always analytical and never encyclopaedic as world history tends
to become.
The ‘thought-style’ or cognitive habitus of global history works against exceptionalism
and special paths. It rejects the privileging of particular historical normalities
or yardsticks – like ‘the West’ or ‘the transition from feudalism to capitalism’ –
against which different trajectories are profiled as aberrations or manifestations of
backwardness. It prefers ‘externalist’ to ‘internalist’ explanations and ideally combines
them both. Methodologically speaking, global history is not defined by its object of
study or its subject matter in the way that economic history is about the economy and
legal history is an investigation into law and its practice. Global history is not about ‘the
globe’. Rather, it should be seen as a particular mode of inquiry: the search for lateral

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and boundary-crossing connectivity, preferably over long distances. Thus, most kinds of
conventional historical research are suitable for being reframed in a global way. ‘Global’
as an adjective can be added to nearly all existing fields. Economic history becomes
global economic history when it addresses planetary flows of goods and money or
discusses the distribution of income, wealth, and productivity between different world
regions. Legal history, conceived of as global legal history, studies the entanglement, and
mutual impact of various legal traditions in conditions of colonialism and intercultural
encounter. A ‘globalized’ history of music establishes connections between the study
of the Western ‘great tradition’, ethnomusicology, and a media-based approach to the
worldwide dissemination and modification of popular musical idioms. Other examples
of such ‘double hyphenation’ come readily to mind: global intellectual history, global
social history, a global history of consumption, and so on. Many sub-disciplines of
historiography lend themselves to this kind of ‘globalification’ (Osterhammel 2015). It
does not render established approaches obsolete but adds a new perspective to them.

Non-debates

International relations theory knows the model of ‘hegemonic war’: a rising power
challenges the incumbent hegemon who in turn struggles to defend his position.
Several episodes in the history of historiography more or less conform to that model.
The rise of social history in the 1960s was accompanied by vehement polemics against
political, diplomatic, and military history and also against a history of ideas that was
deemed old-fashioned at the time. Two decades later, the victorious social historians
found themselves provoked by similarly vitriolic and dismissive cultural historians who
celebrated their own successful toppling of the reigning paradigm.
Compared to those stormy quarrels, the ascent of global history took place under
much more irenic auspices. Widely respected historians of an older generation, foremost
among them William H. McNeill and Fernand Braudel, lent respectability to the parvenu
field. The general zeitgeist of the 1990s was globalist and allowed global history to look
like the obvious and natural way for historians to respond to the demands of a new age.
Whereas in the 1950s Toynbee had been attacked as a megalomaniac dilettante by leading
lights of the historical profession, hardly any major historian denied the legitimacy
and feasibility of global history. Those who may have remained sceptical kept their
reservations to themselves. Many leading journals opened their pages to global topics.
The fact that an increasing number of manuscripts with some kind of global thematic
passed the acid test of peer reviewing testified to the viability of the emerging trend.
How can this low level of conflict be explained? In addition to the generally supportive
atmosphere of the time, it should be noted that everywhere national history was so deeply
entrenched as not to be unsettled by the newcomer. The writing and teaching of history
within the framework of the nation state has remained indispensable for civic education
even in those countries – certainly a minority – where shaping a national outlook and
a national memory did not explicitly belong to the duties of historians paid by the state.

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 Global History

Archives continue to be organized on a national basis. Most historians in the world

prefer to express themselves in their mother tongue. Moreover, only with a little effort
could national history be expanded to accommodate ‘global’ issues such as migration,
colonialism, and intercultural exchange (Bender 2002, 2006; Boucheron 2017; Conrad
and Osterhammel 2004; for China: Osterhammel 1989). In practice, global history was
not necessarily seen as a fundamental threat to national history. Openly nationalist
attacks on the cosmopolitan thinking of globally oriented historians were very rare, at
least in academia.
Criticism was mainly voiced by those who were doubtful whether global history
would meet the general methodological standards of the historical profession. The
questions of sources and of language skills were raised time and again. They could not
be resolved in a general way. A growing number of convincing monographs and articles
put many of those doubts to rest. A kind of unspoken consensus emerged to the effect
that topical research in global history should be based on sources in all the languages
indispensable for the project at hand.
Surprisingly, one major issue was largely left undiscussed. It touched the basic
legitimacy of global history. The new tendency had prospered, generally speaking, in
a postmodernist atmosphere. It took on board certain tenets of the postmodernist and
postcolonial critique, for instance a strong aversion to ‘essentialism’ and ‘othering’ and
a sensibility for the precariousness of language and meaning. In other words, it shared a
constructivist epistemology. Where global historians parted ways with other adherents
of postmodernism is in the question of master narratives. Classical postmodernism,
especially in its French incarnation, had radically rejected any kind of grand récit. Global
history, however, even if it emphasizes the specificity of locality, place, and individual
voices and identities, can never entirely avoid making the kind of general statement that
had been roundly condemned by influential theorists of postmodernism. This inherent
contradiction at the heart of global history has never been sufficiently discussed.

Debates: Explanation, comparison, and circulation analysis

Another debate that did not really unfold was that about description and explanation. The
historiographical mainstream of the 1980s and 1990s celebrated the boundless plurality of
identities and individual voices and achieved impressive feats of colourful description. At
the same time, issues of explanation, so important for Marxist or Weberian social history,
retreated into the background. Foucault-inspired epistemologies of ‘archaeology’ and
‘genealogy’, immensely influential as they were on both sides of the Atlantic, were difficult
to reconcile with conventional notions of explanation. Still, advancing from questions of
‘how?’ to questions of ‘why?’ remains at the core of any scientific inquiry and forms the
strongest bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences. If the ‘widest possible
horizon’ is not seen as an incontestable value in itself, then a global approach requires
justification in terms of its analytical or explanatory surplus. It has to be shown in specific
cases how a global re-contextualization of a given issue improves historical understanding.

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Debating New Approaches to History

To give an obvious example, our insight into the ‘Age of Revolution’ in the decades
around 1800 has been immensely enriched by adding the Haitian Revolution to the
canonical pair of the American and French revolutions and placing the events into the
context of a vast Atlantic arena of interaction (Canny and Morgan 2011; Klooster 2009;
Polasky 2015). It has gained even more by extending the gaze farther to encompass the
revolutionary struggles for Latin American independence and turmoil in Africa and
Asia from Egypt to the Qing empire (Bayly 1989, 1998; Armitage and Subrahmanyam
2010; Wills 2014). But does this shed new light on standard topics of history? Does it,
for instance, deepen our understanding of the French Revolution? Drawing attention
to developments that occurred simultaneously with the revolutionary events in France
is not the same as establishing causal connections which show in what way external
factors helped to trigger the revolutionary cataclysm in Paris. Fortunately, longer chains
of causation have now been suggested and conventional explanations of the revolution
have been refined to combine endogenous and exogenous elements (Campbell 2013;
Hunt 2013). These attempts have to be discussed individually and on their own merit.
A general debate should address the question of the significance of explanation in the
overall methodology of global history. A concomitant question concerns the relation
between cause and effect which is best discussed in economic or ecological terms (Parker
2013). A local event can have distant or general – in other words ‘global’ – causes; in
the early modern period, to give just one example, certain crises in purportedly closed
Asian economies can be traced back to changes in the supply of American silver (Flynn
and Giráldez 2002). Inversely, the ramifications of a local event may affect faraway parts
of the globe. The eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora on 10 April 1815 is a
dramatic case in point (Wood 2014). In many other instances, effects made themselves
felt much more slowly. A global approach is probably of little relevance in accounting
for the July Crisis of 1914. Yet the war that began on 4 August very quickly evolved into
a true world war. Intra-European causes set free global effects. This cannot be shown
by simply stringing together chapters on the different theatres of war (Jeffery 2015). It
requires precise analyses of concrete interactions combined with a sense of the multi-
locational escalation of the conflict (Winter 2014).
One of the debates that was relevant for global history, without being conducted
afresh within the new framework, was about comparative history (Kaelble and Schriewer
2003; Haupt and Kocka 2009; Berg 2013; Olstein 2015: 59–97). It is closely related to the
question of explanation since comparison is one of the most powerful explanatory tools
available to historians. By the early 1990s, the methodology of historical comparison,
pioneered by classical authors like Max Weber, Otto Hintze, or Marc Bloch and elaborated
by the historical sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s, had taken account of ‘cross-cultural’
comparison in the social sciences and had started to reflect on comparisons between
cases from markedly different cultural contexts. The debate centred on questions of
comparability and on the difficult issue of nomenclature: is it justifiable to impose a
unified social science terminology of Western origin on historical situations outside
Western modernity? If not, how do ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ vocabularies relate to one another?
Would a strictly ‘emic’ language, that is one grounded in the self-perception and self-

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expression of the historical actors, leave any room for the semantic commonalities that
are a precondition for comparison?
The next stage in the debate juxtaposed comparison with the study of relations and
transfers, or, to put it differently, the comparative assessment of ‘pure’ cases with the
assumption of ubiquitous entanglement, hybridity, and métissage. Everyone agreed
that at least from the late eighteenth century onwards, pristine, uncontaminated, and
unrelated cases – such as Marc Bloch’s distinct feudalisms in Western Europe and Japan –
have been the exception rather than the rule. Comparison must always take into account
the possibility of external influences on the units of comparison – sometimes mutual
influences, in other cases determinants from a third position. A radical position,
probably endorsed only by a minority of scholars participating in the debate, claimed
that comparison was artificial, ignored the realities of ever-increasing connectivity and
should therefore be abandoned altogether (Werner and Zimmermann 2006; Cohen
2001; Cohen and O’Connor 2004). There is probably a tacit consensus among global
historians that comparison is not entirely useless but has a somewhat old-fashioned feel
and is associated with an old-style world history of ‘great civilisations’ as it nowadays
survives in historical sociology rather than in historiography proper. In any case, the
analysis of relations, movements, and connections has gained unchallenged precedence.
Thus, an anti-comparativist stance chimes in with the principles of global history. Yet
paradoxically, one of the most spectacular success stories of global or world history is
quintessentially comparative: the debate about the Great Divergence (surveyed in Vries
2013). It is impossible to summarize this debate in a few sentences. It was conducted mainly
among economic historians from the early 1980s onwards but has to be seen within the
even wider context of the world historical role of Western modernity and, if one accepts the
premise of the theorem of ‘multiple modernities’, of analogous developments elsewhere.
The results have not been conclusive, but the debate was conducted at a very high level of
sophistication and methodological awareness and has proved the fruitfulness of ‘inter-
cultural’ comparison, in this case especially a comparison between Europe and China.
Significantly (and seldom remarked on in the discussion), connectivity and flows –
the hallmarks of global history – played only a marginal role in the various explanations
put forward for Europe’s and North America’s exceptional economic success since the
late eighteenth century. Very few discussants invoked imperialism, colonialism, and a
politically engineered ‘development of underdevelopment’ as the principal causes of
the economic backwardness of the Global South – factors that had been prominent in
world system theory and Latin American dependencia theories of the 1960s and 1970s.
Thus, in terms of the typology suggested above, the debate about the Great Divergence
falls under the category of comparative world history rather than that of global history
understood as the study of transformative connectivity. The original reasons for
the Great Divergence were usually seen in endogenous factors such as geographical
opportunities and ecological constraints, state structures, or culture and mentality. Only
the further widening of the gap between rich and poor countries that took place during
the nineteenth century was widely attributed to some kind of malign connectivity: the
colonial exploitation of the South by the North.

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A track still to be taken in the international debate refers to a different sense of

comparison: comparison as ‘a process of relational self-definition’ (Seigel 2005: 64;
Epple and Erhart 2015). Individuals, communities, and entire nation states form mental
connections by comparing themselves with others. Europeans of the eighteenth century
compared themselves with Asia. In the nineteenth century, Asian countries from the
Ottoman Empire to Japan took Western Europe (and increasingly the United States)
as a model to be emulated. ‘World society’ as a ‘real’ social formation of worldwide
classes and strata has never come into being, but as an ‘imagined community’ it began
to be created in the nineteenth century through mutual observation and recognition in
a mode of comparison and competition, adaptation, and rejection (Wittmann 2014).
Conceptualizing comparison as a cognitive activity of historical actors easily incorporates
the global level since during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries global standards
– from ‘world power’ to ‘world championships’ – increasingly served as benchmarks
of reference. Another way to bring in the global is to take a more dialectical view of
integration and homogenization at a world level (as pioneered by Bayly 2004). Spinning
the ‘human web’ (McNeill and McNeill 2003; Northrup 2015) ever more densely does
not mean that everything on earth is getting continuously more similar and, thereby, less
suitable for comparison; economists are now coming up with more nuanced concepts
of convergence (Baldwin 2016). As Nile Green has argued, it is precisely the method
of comparison that helps ‘to demonstrate how common forces and parallel processes
operating at a global level can lead to distinct cultural outcomes at a local and regional
level’ (Green 2013: 519).
Whereas the uses of comparison will always be controversial, ‘connectivity’ and
‘circulation’ enjoy a secure position as the twin master concepts of global history. Much
of the enthusiasm surrounding global history derives from a fascination with fluidity,
unimpeded mobility, and endless opportunities for ‘hybrid’ re-combination. However,
it would mean an abdication of intellectual responsibility if the perceived shapelessness
of a dynamic reality were to be reflected in a deliberate fuzziness of analytical categories.
Frederick Cooper’s well-founded warning against the false contrast between ‘a rhetoric
of containers and a rhetoric of flows’ has had little impact, and his question whether
it is possible to ‘develop a differentiated vocabulary that encourages thinking about
connections and their limits’ has largely been left unanswered, at least at the general
level of methodology (Cooper 2005: 112).
The virtues and charms of a semantics of motion are obvious. An impressive array
of studies has shown how spaces of interaction and widely dispersed communities have
been created through the movement of people, commodities, and knowledge (Sood
2011, 2016). Yet the observation of realities in the early twenty-first century makes it
difficult to ignore the fact that mobility stops at fences, walls, and border security desks,
that economic flows produce winners as well as losers, and that ideas and information
can get distorted and manipulated in their passage through less-than-transparent
circuits. The mirage of a world of flat barriers and limitless permeability deserves serious
reconsideration. Global historians are likely to engage with the critique of their own
‘mobility bias’ that has been voiced by anthropologists (Rockefeller 2011; Sedgewick

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 Global History

2014) as well as in two recent thoughtful articles by Monika Dommann (Dommann

2016) and Stefanie Gänger (Gänger 2017). This may also lead to the debate, suggested
by Frederick Cooper in the early 2000s, on how to arrive at a better understanding of
various forms of connectivity within their historical settings. Such a debate will link up
with the problem of causation: connections differ in their impact and transformative
power. They also operate within different framings of space and time. Global history
has been most successful in a synchronic mode that limits the field of observation to
relatively short time spans. Incorporating long-term dynamics without jeopardizing
source-based precision is one of the greatest challenges ahead.1

Comment

Pierre-Yves Saunier
‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition’, and this is why neither three men in purple
robes, nor I, will wittingly spoil this section by putting Jürgen Osterhammel to the
question about specific aspects of his chapter, or being redundant by making points he
covers. I would rather use this space to raise one, two, or even three additional points
that he mentioned briefly, or may have decided to leave out for lack of space. I invite
Jürgen Osterhammel to pick one of these, and to leave the other two for a day when we
have a chance to get acquainted. All of them, I feel, address the capacity of global history
to hold its place in the universe of historical writing in the years to come, and as such
they seem appropriate topics for my comments. Or rather, the capacity of ‘global/world/
transnational/connected history’ – as Jürgen Osterhammel rightly explains these terms –
are often swapped for one another, despite their differences in scope and angle, and this
is why I will use ‘global’ as the sign post for that compact in the rest of this text.
My first entry point deals with the currency of global history, and possible absence
thereof. Here, I will build on two clues provided by the author: on the one hand, he
wonders about the possible backlash of current ‘crises in real globalisation’ on global
history, and on the other he underlines the mostly ‘irenic’ auspices under which
global history has found a place in the sun. Let me start with the latter: During their
emergence and semi-consolidation, did the different propositions for global, connected,
transnational, or transcultural perspectives meet with unanimous assent? I rather feel
that vigorous counter arguments have never ceased to be raised, but initially with
limited traction among academics. Speaking of critical accounts, I do not point to recent
expressions of academic fatigue like David Bell’s (2013) ‘no networks no vast spaces’
slimming diet. I rather think of the low-intensity but constant academic exchanges that
pitted global approaches against national history regarding performance, perspectives,
and interpretation, not unlike previous discussions about world history in the 1940s and
1960s. Instances of such exchanges are familiar to US and German historians, but they
also took place in several other instances such as the reception of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s
biography of Vasco da Gama, a key figure of the Portuguese national imaginary, by some

35
Debating New Approaches to History

Portuguese historians (McGerr 1991; Johnson 2006; Wehler 2006; Xavier and Santos
2007). The defence of the national framework, as an object of specific or comparative
study, and as a basis for the national narrative, was the key here and there.
There were other mild appraisals on similar grounds elsewhere, but none gave way
to a controversy like the ones that have left their mark in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century historiography. First, because the challenge was often modestly worded and
developed in niches. Secondly, because of momentum: globalization processes were
the talk of the town, from the economy to migrations to terrorism. It was hard to be
against perspectives that chimed in with the general atmosphere and which could place
history in debates and discussions where sociologists, economists, and anthropologists
had featured prominently without much of a contribution by historians. Third, the new
perspectives were sociologically compatible with changes at work in the profession
regarding the ways one became and operated as a historian, especially through the
increased familiarity with other historical milieus, historiographies, and histories than
one’s national.
Jürgen Osterhammel then seems to be right when he states that ‘openly nationalist
attacks on the cosmopolitan thinking of globally oriented historians were very rare,
at least in academia’. Yet, such attacks were not rare in the public sphere, especially
around redefinitions of school curricula. In the United States, the College Board’s plan
to revamp its framework for the US history advanced placement course raised hell in
2012–15, while in France the new curricula for history at the secondary school level
never ceased to be disputed from 2008 to 2013. In both countries, individuals and
movements identified with conservatism denounced anti-national narratives and
identified global/transnational perspectives as one of the culprits, propelled by a leftist
hostility to the nation.
With recent events such as Brexit in Europe, the election of Donald Trump in the
United States, and a series of major elections in 2017 Europe, from the Netherlands to
Germany, some in the North Atlantic world feel that we have reached a pivotal moment
– although those events and their exact consequences remain to unfold. The cleavage
between ‘patriots and globalists’ would now be the new fault line within societies and
polities, and more generally the Zeitgeist would turn against global/world/transnational/
connected history. Early in 2017, a book and its reception seemed to materialize this
possibility (see Wikipedia 2017 for a round up). Published a few months before the
French presidential election, L’histoire mondiale de la France, mentioned by Jürgen
Osterhammel, is an edited collection of vignettes that each starts from a specific date/
event to showcase what French history owes to the world out there, with contributions by
122 historians. The introduction is explicit that the book aims at providing a contrapuntal
timeline to that of the ‘national legend’, using the insights provided by global and
connected history. The public has embraced the volume with unexpected enthusiasm for
an edited collection written by academic historians, but its publication also unleashed
scathing comments from columnists and essayists who qualified the book as an attempt
to ‘dissolve France’, its contributors as ‘gravediggers of the great French heritage’, and the
global perspective as the silver bullet to ‘make France disappear’. Pierre Nora, a major

36
 Global History

French intellectual and historian of international fame as the anchor for the Lieux de
mémoire series, added his voice to the choir and stated the book was nothing but a
political statement. This was in line with previous interventions he had made, especially
during the 2008–13 curriculum debate where he stressed how global or world history
approaches were used to oust the teaching of national history. Other historians have also
expressed critical views and crossed swords with the volume’s editor, and the quarrel is
certainly not finished.
Like the debate around L’histoire mondiale de la France, the discussion around curricula
and the low-intensity academic skirmishes surrounding the growth of global history
build on trends, arguments, and positions that have long been shaping the relationship
between the teaching and writing of history and the social and political struggles to
define the spine of the French and US nations. This is why I ask Jürgen Osterhammel
to return to his evaluation of the conflictual situations around global history: when we
move beyond the polite world of scientific journals and conferences, how extensive have
been the conflicts surrounding the development of such perspectives? If the elephant has
been in the room much before Brexit and the 2016–17 ‘year of living dangerously’, what
is the potential of this moment to renew or reshape the debate, and is there any reason
to think that global history ‘has had its moment’ and will lose its currency? How shall
global history continue its investigations of past impactful connections in a present that
would discredit such connections?
Jeremy Adelman’s recent intervention will allow me to segue into my next point,
whose keyword would be ‘timeliness’. The director of the Global History Lab at
Princeton University confesses to the original sin that global history has forgotten the
‘power of place’, something which real-world events of 2016–17 would remind us of with
a vengeance (Adelman 2017). He also identifies global history with the project of making
the world safe for cosmopolitanism through a celebration of border-crossing. He has a
point here: the contribution to an appeased world, freed from the scourge of confronting
nations and cultures thanks to a better understanding of its interdependences, has been
part and parcel of the motivations of many global historians. It was and is a frequent
rationale for convincing reviewers, readers, funding agencies, and university committees
of the worthiness of their approach (global history for a global present and a better
future). Moreover, it is clear that not enough attention has been paid to the strikingly
similar use and value current historians append to the very same terms and phrases that
were used by historical protagonists who conducted or observed world-making projects
over time, such as ‘connections’, ‘networks’, ‘links’, ‘interdependence’, ‘cosmopolitanism’,
or ‘space compression’ (Sivasundaram 2017). But, unlike what Adelman suggests in
his final paragraph, possibly in a cunning rhetorical double flip, this did not prevent
global history to write stories of disintegration, chart the interruption of circulations,
analyze the severance or rejection of connections, identify cross-border individuals,
ideas, and situations that did not aim at or work at the welfare of humankind and to
provide critical assessments of views that the world was becoming flat, homogenous,
and irenic. Likewise, global history has not boiled down to macro-narratives forgetful of
place, and its obvious mobility tropism did not drum out what stays put and contained.

37
Debating New Approaches to History

Studies of communication and transportation have enhanced the role of immobile

infrastructures, anchored into specific sites, work about migrations has woven together
the stories of those who left and those who remained to see if and how the latter were
affected, historians of commodities and their chains have anchored stories that moved
in specific sites where values and usages build up. The concern about the effectiveness
of circulations and connections is not foreign to global/world/transnational/connected
historians: it is an element of their question list, side by side with their commitment
to work across spatial levels (and to be critical of the definition and hierarchy of the
latter). That leads me to the question I submit to Jürgen Osterhammel: if there have
been several guiding scripts motivating global historians, what has been the place of the
study of ‘transformative dis-connections’, and does it constitute a promising horizon for
global history?
My third point, which bears the tag of possibilities, has to do with the ongoing
digitization process and the way it affects historians: digitization of sources, digitization
of documentation and research practices, digitization of methods, digitization of
publication. This is not the right place, nor the right author, to assess the process and
pronounce on its final outcome, a big revolution or a great illusion – in either case it will
involve major consequences for all branches of knowledge production. At this moment,
I would rather invite Jürgen Osterhammel to ponder the relationship between digital
history and global history through a few configurations, and to tease out the possibilities
in front of us.
The first configuration takes shape at the intersection of the banal digitization of
global historians’ daily practices and of the prospects of big data for global history.
Lara Putnam has explored how the amount of digital resources has, incrementally and
without that much self-reflection, affected the way we build our reference apparatus and
bibliography as much as the way we identify and obtain our primary sources (Putnam
2016). What has been gained in the process of becoming digitized historians is especially
clear to those who stretch across the usual territorial units of historical understanding
to create courses and course materials, or to imagine and conduct research projects:
the cost, speed, scope, and effectiveness of ‘lateral glances’ were dramatically redefined,
as stressed by Putnam. But she also puts her finger on the ‘disintermediated’ sort of
relationship that emerges from the fact that algorithms and processors have substituted
our eyes, ears, fingers, brain, and bodies. The material we process, or the places we study,
may now remain at arm’s length without visible damage. Knowability, though, is affected
by what this is making redundant: the familiarization with search tools and what they
have ‘under their hood’; a capacity for self-reflection on the research strategies that we
elaborate; the heuristic input from on location discussions and disputes with librarians,
archivists, and scholars in and from places we are not conversant with, and so on. These
consequences of a yet under acknowledged dependent relationship with the digital
‘search box’, probably the most frequently used historians’ tools by now, shape the first leg
of my argument. The second leg, about the prospects of big data for global history, stems
from the different undertakings led by Patrick Manning at the University of Pittsburgh
around the World History Center/Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis

38
 Global History

(Manning 2013, 2017). Through a number of initiatives and consortia, Manning and his
team are proposing a combination that should be able to reshape history as we know it.
Based on the collection, aggregation, and analysis of world historical data on a global
scale for the post-1500 era, the agenda is to tackle issues that humanity is grappling
with at the planetary level – beginning with inequality. Generally, the treatment of the
data to be aggregated will provide a picture ‘of global social patterns and interactions’
(Manning 2012: 1). Regarding inequality, analysis of the interaction between variables
and confrontation with social theories ‘will seek to identify the sources, scale, and effects
of inequality, with an effort to disaggregate its various economic, social, and natural
dimensions’ (Manning 2017: 17). The establishment and treatment of that huge amount
of data will be based on massive collaborative work among historians and with social
scientists, and its results would bring historians and history together with the social
sciences to bear on policy formulation and implementation, thus giving the discipline a
new purchase.
If I connect these two legs, the disintermediation of ordinary practices and the
hypervitaminated global quantitative historical sociology approach, I find a version of
the historical episteme that seems at odds with some points recently made by Sebastian
Conrad in his overview of global history (Conrad 2016, esp. chaps. 8, 9, and 10). Here,
Conrad insists on the need for global historians not to ‘flatten the world’ by seeing it at a
distance and through abstract terminology, categories, and notions of which universality
is not questioned as the product of specific local histories. In his text, Jürgen Osterhammel
criticizes ‘big history’ à la David Christian or Fred Spier for delivering generalizations
that are not based on sources and for being too distant from mundane concerns. His
concluding sentence returns to that point when he suggests that ‘incorporating long term
dynamics without jeopardizing source-based precision is one of the greatest challenges
ahead’. What does he think of the possibilities that the digitization of history and digital
history offer to global history in terms of sources, their abundance, and distance thereof,
both in access and in analysis?
This not being a state-of-the-art survey of digital history and the way global historians
have responded to it, I will add just another aspect that I feel to be of special interest
here. Because of its interest in circulations, connections, and relations as they have been
made, not made, and unmade, and in consequence of its need to work across scales,
global history faces a narrative challenge. Mobile or not, the processes, factors, living
and non-living organisms that these stories deal with have to be located and followed
in space and across time. Such stories have been told with talent by means of the book
and the article, and we have certainly not exhausted the capacity of the codex format.
Yet, the digital is presenting global history with additional options for telling a story and
presenting a thick argument: mapping, visualization techniques, hyperlinked writing,
non-linear organization are some of the features that can match form and content,
bringing readers and users to engage differently with historians’ arguments, stories, and
source material. Being hindered from boasting about my ignorance by the briefness of
these comments, I will offer out two instances among the many publications that can
be used to discuss the relationship between global history and digital narration. One

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Debating New Approaches to History

of these is the now defunct but still suggestive HyperCities platform, which was built
to create and publish ‘geotemporal narratives’ (HyperCities 2017; Presner, Shepard, and
Kawano 2014). HyperCities offered the capacity to geolocalize points of narration and to
enrich these with text and multimedia material. This provided authors with the capacity
to ‘write time in space’, which seems congenial to what global/world/transnational/
connected historians are doing. Let me just add that HyperCities did not disappear from
lack of users or interest, but because Google discontinued its Earth browser Application
Programming Interface in February 2017: without this indispensable cog, the platform
stopped working, an additional clue of the durability challenge in digital humanities.2
The other is the web site that has been created to pair with Nicole Starosielski’s book
about the historical and present condition of undersea cable systems in the Pacific
(Starosielski 2015; Starosielski, Loyer, and Brennan 2016). Here, stories are told
sequentially and can be read along paths or hops along the cables themselves. They are
organized by place and themes to convey both the enclosure and extent, vulnerability
and capacity, homogeneity and differentiation of these systems as an infrastructure with
technological, environmental, human, and economic coordinates. My final question
then invites Jürgen Osterhammel to examine if he feels there are special opportunities
for global history in such formats, genres, and modes of digital narrative, and how they
can combine with, supplement, replace the ones we are using now. By and large, this
should be more enticing than the rack and cushion treatments.

Response

Jürgen Osterhammel
Since I was cautious enough not to tout my own preferred version of global history
Pierre-Yves Saunier did not feel obliged to demolish an edifice of axioms, key concepts,
value judgements, and unspoken assumptions. A sterner critic might have taken issue
with my reconstruction of actual and virtual debates and pointed out, for example, a
lack of engagement with discussions in national or regional history communities outside
the Anglophone, Francophone, and German-speaking worlds (but now see Beckert and
Sachsenmaier 2018). It is indeed a striking paradox that global history writing, while
united in a shared mood of barrier-free cosmopolitanism, is not on the way to becoming
monochrome and monolingual. Fortunately, I should add.
Pierre-Yves Saunier agrees with my emphasis on the role and special responsibility of
global history in the public sphere and he encourages us to go even further than I did in
my remarks and confront scepticism and even hostility, as he puts it, ‘beyond the polite
world of scientific journals and conferences’. On this kind of well-groomed home turf
global historians have, as a rule, been treated kindly. For their part, they have refrained
from the iconoclastic vehemence, sometimes verging on verbal patricide, that helped the
young social historians of the 1960s and 1970s – my own academic teachers – to clear
away what they believed to be the debris of woolly-minded political and intellectual

40
 Global History

history. In contrast to social history, global history has not been a one-generation
project. It also did not come along with a fully articulated methodology similar to that
of a Neo-Weberian Historische Sozialwissenschaft as represented by Hans-Ulrich Wehler
and Jürgen Kocka in Germany. In a word that I was reluctant to use in my chapter: It was,
and still is, the methodological and theoretical eclecticism of global history that blunted
the edge of its bursting onto the scene and that guaranteed its respectability. Had this
been otherwise and had, for example, all global history nailed orthodox postcolonialism
to its mast, the threshold of acceptance would have been much higher.
Resistance outside ‘the polite world’ comes from parliamentary politics and ministries
of science and education, from funding agencies, university managements, and the
media, sometimes from censorship bodies. Nationalist backlashes, invariably linked
to restrictions of free speech, are today in evidence in many important countries from
China and India through Poland and Turkey to the United States, though least of all
in Germany where not even conservative historians celebrate the glory of the nation.
There are no general recipes what global historians can do to move – or keep – their
own concerns close to the top of any list of political and academic priorities. My own
experiences are limited to the small – and hardly representative – world of German
academia (Osterhammel 2009). As far as the university is concerned, they would suggest
that not all energies should be invested in the constructing of a neat and autonomous
sub-discipline at the expense of keeping boundaries permeable and striking alliances
with neighbouring fields and ‘enlightened’ representatives of national history and area
studies. Young scholars in countries where the job market does not offer a steady stream
of attractive options for global historians would be well advised not to put all their
academic eggs into the global basket but cultivate a sideline interest in at least one more
modest and mundane topic that is compatible with the average sensibilities in smallish
history departments.
In the public realm, and provided individual access to media is secured, historians
should feel called upon to oppose historical misrepresentations and perversions of
history of any kind, even, if necessary, doubtful accounts of global constellations – think
only of one-sided and triumphalist interpretations of the Cold War. The question is
who seeks when and with what purpose the advice of the world historian. Sometimes,
the temptation is considerable. Media crave for the biggest picture in the roughest
possible outline, and nobody seems more willing and able to offer it than the seemingly
omnicompetent and prophetically gifted globalist. This is a big chance for the right word
at the right moment. Yet, and this partly explains my reservation towards certain kinds
of Big History, the much-vaunted global perspective may sometimes lack the necessary
acuity and sense of proportion. Then climate change is not a real problem because we
already had it millions of years ago, mass migration is a ‘normal’ feature of history
(correct, but what does that mean for the pressing problems in today’s Mediterranean?),
or active head of states evoke entertaining but hardly instructive parallels to some of the
more colourful tyrants in the global past. The very large picture can obfuscate things and
create an atmosphere of specious profundity. In other words, global historians should
never sacrifice a commitment to the outmost precision and clarity – a cardinal virtue of

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all kinds of historical argument. This is why I am seldom impressed by the plain assertion
that something is connected. The rewarding question rather is why things are connected,
with what effects on whom, and who made them connect in the first place.
This leads immediately to the second issue raised by my benevolent commentator.
The observation that some connections look inevitable, flowing, as it were, with the
stream of history, while upon closer inspection they appear to be highly improbable and
almost a source of wonder, has always been a starting point for the kind of global history
I am trying to practice and, with some hesitation, to advocate. Niels Petersson and I
made that idea a cornerstone of a small book on globalization that we published in 2003,
at a time when the topic was just being discovered by historians and the globalization
euphoria among social scientists was reaching unprecedented heights (English version,
Osterhammel and Petersson 2005). Perhaps this scepticism, too, owes something to
a generational experience. My generation saw two progressivist kinds of ‘Whiggism’
collapse and disappear: modernization theory (with its offshoots in ‘end of history’
fantasies) and Marxism of the Soviet type, while we were raised on various less sanguine
antidotes: a ‘sober’ realism in Max Weber’s footsteps, the more dialectical manifestations
of Marxism (including Frankfurt-style critical theory) and a postmodernist sense
of ambiguity and precariousness. This is why Pierre-Yves Saunier’s injunction, as I
understand him, to develop a rich repertoire of ‘guiding scripts’ far beyond the blatantly
obvious master narratives of integration, connectedness, entanglement, hybridization,
and cosmopolitan harmony is very well taken.
Global history still holds an enormous potential for experiments with literary forms
and modes of presentation. Current practice ranges from the short essay via the solid
monograph to the textbook and the sprawling ‘synthesis’. But guiding – and not so
guiding – scripts may come in many more shapes and guises, a great number of them
still unexplored or unknown. These include stories of failure, loss, and regression; stories
about groups and individuals; stories not just with active globalizers as their heroes but
also about the passively globalized or the simply forgotten. Once again, this is a plea for
the specific and for its inclusion into wider horizons. I am not proposing that global
historians limit themselves to studies of diasporas or biographies of globetrotters, the
more obscure the better. The task ahead is to come up with more refined forms of writing
that combine life-stories with the larger tendencies and more comprehensive contexts
that historians are trained to identify and analyse.
This detour to problems of narration should, finally, serve as an excuse when Pierre-
Yves Saunier invites me to comment on global history’s digital future about which he
writes so persuasively. Whoever cares for telling a tale is likely to keep a distance from
numbers. To be sure, methods of digitization have an apparent affinity with my insistence
on precision. That I harbour a certain suspicion when it comes to more or less intelligent
estimates, especially for premodern times, dressed up as ‘data’, is probably born out of
ignorance. Still, I am inclined to skirt the issue. Why? For the last time, let me invoke
the generational factor. Internationally speaking, digital humanities are less than twenty
years old. They came to the attention of the ordinary German historian just a few years
ago. Most members of the profession still lack a sufficient understanding of the new

42
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world of possibilities, let alone an adequate technical training. As a retired professor,

cut off from funding for costly digitization projects, I revel in the simplicity of pen and
paper, occasional use of a personal computer not entirely ruled out.

Notes

1. Acknowledgements: This article has benefited enormously from comments by the members of
the Konstanz-based Leibnizpreis Research Group ‘Global Processes’, funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
2. Communication with Todd Presner, March 2017.

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CHAPTER 2
POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY
Rochona Majumdar

A search for postcolonialism’s intellectual genealogy will no doubt lead us to literature

and cultural studies departments of Anglo-American universities where this body
of ideas found their earliest articulation and nurturance. Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak,
Edward Said, and others’ call to change the canon of literary studies issued in the wake
of the publication of such novels as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) was
a prominent aspect of postcolonial theory’s complex past. The focus on its literary
background, however, obscures the ways in which postcolonial thought has shaped such
humanistically oriented social science disciplines as history. Fundamental interventions
by historians have produced significant shifts in postcolonial theory, so much so that
a new subfield ‘postcolonial history’ is now well established within the discipline. This
new sub-discipline of history, by no means homogenous, is nonetheless characterized
by some common themes. In what follows, I lay out the conceptual foundations
of postcolonial history. Following that, I consider the widespread influence of the
postcolonial outlook by analysing some examples from domains as further afield from
one another as medieval history, new imperial history, and histories of gender and race.
I close this chapter by identifying some new directions in which postcolonial historians
appear to be headed.

Beginnings

As with any complex set of ideas, it would be a mistake to seek a single point of origin
of postcolonial history writing. But there is no doubt that certain events and themes
that became popular during the era of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century
contributed to the making of this oeuvre. The Bandung conference of 1955, described
by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha as ‘that daunting quest for a nonaligned
postcolonial world’, was one such event (Bhabha 2004: ix). Twenty-nine free nations
of Asia and Africa, represented by some 600 delegates, came together from 18 to 24
April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, to mark their commitment to a post-imperial
world. Another contributing factor, alongside the anti-imperial euphoria on display at
Bandung, was also the disappointment of many decolonized peoples at the failure of
their respective nation states to deliver on the promises of modernization, alleviation
of poverty, forms of inequality, and varieties of prejudice. By the late 1960s, several
countries – South Africa, Palestine, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Hungary, and Poland to
name but a few – were convulsed by people’s struggles that challenged the legitimacy
Debating New Approaches to History

of their respective governments, if not their nations as well. Both decolonization and
strident critiques of the newly independent nation states marked the beginning of what
later came to be described as the postcolonial outlook. The postcolonial stance, while
sharing with anti-colonial movements their criticisms of imperialism, was also different
in that it incorporated a critique of the nation state, something that anti-colonial thought
took for granted.
The process is captured well in the African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s remembrance
of his time during 1964–67 at the University of Leeds where he witnessed the global
character of postcolonial protests:

The political struggles to move the centre, the vast decolonization process changing
the political map of the post-war world, had also a radicalizing effect in the West
particularly among the young and this was best symbolized by the support the
Vietnamese struggle was enjoying among the youth. This radical tradition had
in turn an impact on the African students at Leeds making them look even more
critically at the content rather than the form of the decolonization process, taking
their cue from Fanon’s critique in the rightly celebrated chapter in The Wretched
of the Earth entitled ‘the Pitfalls of National Consciousness’. (Thiong’o wa 1993: 3)

If the nation state idealized as a form lost some legitimacy in the ex-colony by the late
1960s, the former metropolitan countries too became sites of post-imperial upheaval.
Indigenous groups and minorities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand grew vocal in their demands for rights and compensation from their respective
states while second-wave feminism asserted women’s rights to their bodies, their sexual
being, and against gender stereotypes. Anti-colonial thinkers were rediscovered anew
in these turbulent times: Gandhi by Martin Luther King in the United States and Frantz
Fanon by indigenous and anti-race activists in Australia and Britain. But the racism
they fought, as postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009: 14) noted, was ‘itself
of post-imperial origins: it was born of cultural adjustments necessitated by the loss of
empire and rise in migration of colored peoples’.
This brief rehearsal of its genealogy clarifies two aspects of postcolonial historical
thought. The first is a suggestion about periodization built into the expression
postcolonial. Leela Gandhi alluded to this when she remarked, ‘Whereas some critics
invoke the hyphenated form “post-colonialism” as a decisive temporal marker of the
decolonizing process’, there were others who queried ‘the implied separation between
colonialism and its aftermath on the grounds that the postcolonial condition is
inaugurated with the onset rather than the end of colonial occupation’ (Gandhi 1998: 3).
Scholars of the latter dispensation prefer the unbroken term ‘postcolonialism’ as a more
accurate approximation of conditions that ensued with colonial rule. More recently,
David Armitage offered an analysis of postcolonialism that resonates with Gandhi’s gloss
on the term. A ‘strong version’ of the term postcolonial Armitage proposed ‘assumes
the continuity of colonialism beyond independence or decolonisation but avoids the
disabling narratives of inclusion and exclusion, inferiority and superiority, achievement

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and potential, which informed the ideology of colonialism itself ’ (Armitage 2007: 251).
Robert Young gave postcolonialism’s genealogy a different twist when he insisted on a
distinction between ‘anticolonial’ ideas of the periphery and those that developed in the
heart of the former metropolitan societies. The label ‘postcolonial’, in his opinion, was
more apposite to the latter. Postcolonial writings, he noted, argue for the equality of the
‘cultures of the decolonized nations’ by taking ‘the struggle into the heartland of the
former colonial powers’ (Young 2001: 57–65).
Related to the issue of periodization is also a limitation of postcolonial histories. As is
clear from the aforementioned statements, postcolonial theory emerged late in the second
half of the twentieth century in the wake of the second wave of anti-colonial liberation
movements in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Since its conception, it left
out of reckoning the ‘first wave’ of independence movements that took place in Latin
America in the early nineteenth century, a shortcoming pointed out by Fernando Coronil
among others. Any project that attempts to seriously revise the claims of postcolonial
theory will have to engage with the ideas contained in the works of Latin American
critics, thinkers, and historians such as Enrico Dussel, Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo,
Fernando Coronil, José Rabasa, Florencia Mallon, Barbara Weinstein, and others.
However, the emergence of independent nations in Latin America in the nineteenth
century, as argued by Benedict Anderson’s celebrated book Imagined Communities,
belonged to the story of the rise of nation states and not their later critiques. It was the
era of decolonization of the mid-twentieth century that created the condition for the
rise of postcolonial theory. Latin American nations gained independence from colonial
rule in the nineteenth century, an age that witnessed a tide of nationalisms. Postcolonial
history and theory could not have arisen under those conditions.
These upheavals in the political sphere did not leave undisturbed the sanctum of the
university. The challenge to the legitimacy of imperialism and colonialism gave rise to
critical questions among left-leaning intellectuals about the efficacy of Marxist and other
structuralist theories in understanding global change and their representation. One sign
of this shift was the popularity of Frantz Fanon’s text The Wretched of the Earth in the
1980s. Popular mobilization in rural hinterlands, beginning with the Cultural Revolution
in 1966 and climaxing with the Vietnam War, brought to the fore the role of the peasant
as an agent of revolutionary social change, a theme that inspired academic efforts such
as the Journal of Peasant Studies and later on Subaltern Studies. Postcolonial studies
emerged in the academe during this critical conjuncture of global events. Situating its
emergence thus, it should come as no surprise that the field is ‘marked by a dialectic
between Marxism on the one hand, and poststructuralism/postmodernism, on the other’
(Gandhi 1998: viii). Given this background, it is also not hard to fathom why the field
is rife with ‘debates between the competing claims of nationalism and internationalism,
strategic essentialism and hybridity, solidarity and dispersal, the politics of structure/
totality and the politics of the fragment’ (Gandhi 1998: ix).
Informed by this theoretical outlook, postcolonial historians, though sympathetic to
the works done by the British Marxist ‘histories from below’, were also critical of the
Marxist teleology of development that marked the works of Eric Hobsbawm or E. P.

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Thompson. Likewise, debates about high and low cultures led them to renew attention
to literary texts as historical sources. While a serious questioning of the canon became
the mainstay of postcolonial studies in literature departments, in the field of history
the privileged position of the nation as a predominant theme of research and received
litanies about a unified nationalism came to be questioned as scholars began to think
of identities not as a Manichean separation between black and white or colonizer and
colonized but as interstitial or in-between. Likewise, mainstream nationalism was
perceived as unrepresentative of the different peoples who constituted any particular
nation state. These moves shared some overlaps with parallel developments in writing
the history of everyday life and oral history such as Alltagsgeschichte in Germany and
microstoria in Italy. What distinguished postcolonial historiography from these bodies
of scholarship was its sympathy with certain ideas gleaned from poststructuralist and
other continental philosophy that inspired, among other things, critiques of notions of
an unified subjectivity, teleological thinking, and attention to cultural and discursive
aspects of colonialism.

Conceptual foundations

Many of the foundational ideas of postcolonial history writing were first enunciated in
historical scholarship focused on South and East Asia, respectively. In the interest of space,
and acutely conscious of the risks that attend simplifying a considerable and complex body
of ideas, let me attempt a summary of postcolonial history’s conceptual core. Crucial to
this mode of history writing is a demonstration of the legacy of the colonial past in many
insoluble problems faced by nation states following decolonization (Guha 1997: ix). This
in turn, as demonstrated by scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, Gyanendra Pandey, and
others, is due to the complicated genealogy of both nationalist movements and nationalist
thought. Nationalism, as a political project could only be successful if it challenged the
‘alleged inferiority’ of the colonized, thereby calling into question the legitimacy of
colonial rule. It had then to follow up that challenge by promising modernization and
development whilst also maintaining a sense of cultural authenticity. Notwithstanding
the huge achievement of nationalisms that accomplished these tasks, there remained a
contradiction at the heart of the nationalist project. Namely, that even as such thought
challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the intellectual
premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based. Building on the
notion of the ‘fragment’, defined by Gyanendra Pandey as that which resisted ‘the drive
for a shallow homogenisation’, and favouring instead potentially richer definitions of the
‘nation’ and the future political community, postcolonial historians turned their attention
to groups whose fit with official narratives of nationalism was always uneasy (Pandey 1997:
3). Documenting the histories of women, lower castes, peasants, the vernacular press, and
the theatre, Partha Chatterjee evolved a theory of cultural sovereignty that accounted
for the claims that Third World nationalisms made about the colonial-nationalist subject
being ‘modern’ while maintaining an autonomy of consciousness vis-à-vis the colonizer.

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In an argument that has gained wide currency among historians globally, Chatterjee
claimed ‘anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty well before it
begins its political battle with imperial power’ (Chatterjee 1993: 6). A binary division
between the inner and the outer, the spiritual and the material, and the private and
public realms of life marks the history of nationalism and of the postcolonial state that
followed, he argued. The inner/spiritual/private domains corresponded to the realms
where the colonized felt capable of resisting the thrall of the colonizer and staked their
sovereignty vis-à-vis the West. In sharp contrast were the outer/material/public realms
that included the arena of official politics and professional life where the colonized
succumbed to political will and ideological power of the West. Nationalism’s success
in holding the colonizer at bay from the inner domain did not mean that this realm
was sequestered from change. Rather, as Chatterjee argued, ‘here nationalism launches a
“modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined
community, then it is brought into being in the inner/ spiritual/ private realms. Here, its
true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is in the
hands of the colonial power’ (Chatterjee 1993: 6).
Chatterjee’s analysis of the nationalist separation inner/outer or material/spiritual
division has not gone unchallenged. It has been justifiably argued that these binaries
mapped too neatly on to a classical liberal separation between church and state, home
and the world, and therefore remained a modular variant of the metropolitan model.
Feminist critics, in particular, argued that the equation of women with the inner/spiritual/
private realm underplayed late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critiques of
patriarchy and of women’s increasing participation in professional and political life.
Chatterjee’s analysis of nationalism has to be placed alongside Prasenjit Duara’s
critique of Hegelian teleology and a specific understanding of the ‘people’. The latter, he
demonstrated was a formation both ‘ancient and pristine’ as well as a ‘new and modern’.
The ‘people’ was ‘the basis of the nation’s sovereignty’, an entity that was acknowledged
by nationalist leaders and intellectuals alike as ‘old’, and yet requiring a rebirth so as ‘to
partake of the new world’ (Duara 1995: 31). A telling example Duara discusses in this
connection was the post-1948 debate around the emblem of the menorah and the seven
stars on the Israeli flag. The former a symbol of the ancient rootedness of the Jewish
people in the land and the latter a sign of the modern work-week. The cumulative thrust
of these critiques was a questioning of the quasi-Hegelian idea of linear progression
in history and the periodization of modernity as a post-Enlightenment phenomenon.
Bringing this critique to bear on writings in the People’s Republic of China that regarded
the emergence of the Chinese state as a modernization story, Duara showed it instead, to
be a repository of contested subjectivities, where older forms of community tangled with
newer imaginings that arose in conversation with Western Europe and other emerging
nations of the world.
No discussion of the conceptual arsenal of postcolonial history is complete without
reference to the idea of ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2007). If a demonstration of
the limitations of mainstream nationalism and the failure of totalizing national histories
in representing the reality of subaltern lives is a critical aspect of postcolonial history’s

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conceptual arsenal, so too is a critical reappraisal of narratives of transition to capitalism,

otherwise known as developmentalism. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2000 book Provincializing
Europe offers the clearest articulation of this aspect of postcolonial history writing. The
book issues challenge to Eurocentric thought even as it acknowledges the importance of
this body of thinking to the historian’s enterprise. Described as at once ‘indispensable’
and ‘inadequate’, a cluster of ideas that became global is subjected to interrogation in this
book. One such important idea is the developmental sense of history that Chakrabarty
calls ‘historicism’. ‘Historicism’, he argues, refers to a mode of thinking that ‘tells us that in
order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must see it as an historically
evolving entity, that is, first as an individual and unique whole – as some kind of unity
in potential – and second, as something that develops over time’ (Chakrabarty 2008:
89–90). Marxist histories abound in references to historical phases described as the pre-
capitalist, feudal, or pre-bourgeois. The assumption undergirding such categories is that
as societies move from the pre-capitalist to the capitalist, or from feudal to modern, they
eventually converge on the global stage. Until they do so, non-Western societies must
strive to follow the model set by those ahead of them in the developmental race.
The political implications of this type of developmental thought are not hard to
deduce. Until they were schooled in protocols of Western politics and civility – in other
words ‘political modernity’ – non-Western societies were deemed incapable of self-rule.
‘Historicism’, Chakrabarty (2007: 7) posits, ‘is what made modernity or capitalism look
not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating
in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it’. The vehicle of this spread was
colonial rule and its central message of the superiority of the West. As a schema, this
message denied what Johannes Fabian called ‘coevalness’ to colonized peoples (Fabian
2014). In what has become an influential shorthand of the idea of Provincializing Europe,
historicism is the means by which large sections of the world’s populations are relegated
to an imaginary ‘waiting room’ of history where they are told that they are ‘not yet’ ready
for rights that are in principle considered universal. Most anti-colonial nationalisms
asserted that the colonized were always already fit for self-rule, regardless of their
level of education or political consciousness measured by the yardsticks of Western,
classical, liberal thought. They substituted the colonial injunction of the ‘not yet’ with
the nationalist assertion of the ‘now’ (Chakrabarty 2007: 8–9).
By conceptualizing the history of capitalism and ideas of progress associated with
it in this manner, the postcolonial critique embodied in Provincialing Europe holds up
in clear relief the problems of Eurocentrism. To provincialize Europe is not to reject
European ideas. It is rather to demonstrate the inadequacies of European thought
to the task of understanding the ‘plural normative horizons’ specific to the lives and
existence of different populations in the world. Crucially, it establishes that postcolonial
historiography is not a nativist turn that demanded an outright rejection of European
categories; a crude or simple-minded project of ‘bashing the Enlightenment and
modernity’ that the historian Frederick Cooper (2005: 6) alleges it to be. Chakrabarty’s
move of acknowledging the crucial importance of European thought in shaping the
intellectual world of the colonized also incorporated a point made central to postcolonial

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criticism by the writings of Homi Bhabha in particular: that postcolonial criticism

actually rejects a binary divide separating the colonizer from the colonized.

Postcolonial historiographies

The aforementioned ideas that constitute the core of postcolonial historiography’s

intellectual agenda have profoundly shaped works by historians working in other
subfields of history. Let me offer a few snapshots of the most remarkable instances of
synergy between postcolonial and other histories that I have analysed at length elsewhere
(Majumdar 2010).

Medieval postcolonialism

Even though it might initially appear oxymoronic, postcolonial histories of the Middle
Ages have emerged as a thriving area of historical scholarship. Despite the caution
sounded by some that a ‘postcolonial society has a historical specificity and density
that is not easily translated into premodern worlds’ (Spiegel 2000: 250), others have
proceeded to illustrate the rich dividends that postcolonial approaches bring to the study
of the Middle Ages.
Three related areas best illustrate the synergy between postcoloniality and medieval
history. First, medieval historians, most prominently Kathleen Biddick and Kathleen
Davis, have drawn upon postcolonial theories of temporality to interrogate the practice
of periodization that is so central to the historian’s craft. Periodization, they have argued,
was never an innocent gesture and was always inextricably related to questions of politics.
Thus, the consigning of the medieval period to the ‘dark ages’ of European history, neatly
boxed in the millennium stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance
and Reformation, was tied with questions of European imperialism, colonialism, and
sovereignty. The insights drawn from this body of medieval historical work make us
aware of the ideological power wielded by those (peoples, institutions, nation states)
who deploy the category of the medieval to critique certain social formations. Second,
infused with a postcolonial temper many revisionist works demonstrate the myriad ways
in which the Middle Ages haunt debates about modernity from the late eighteenth to
the twentieth centuries. Rather than regard the medieval and modern as hermetically
sealed units of time and culture, scholars have demonstrated how ideas of the medieval
were constitutive of the modern. As well, the presence of medieval traces in the modern
signal certain recalcitrant and critical currents within modernity. Finally, medievalists
like Ananya Kabir, Nicholas Howe, and Louise D’Arcens have drawn upon postcolonial
critiques of Eurocentrism, calling into question the spatial conception of the Middle Ages
as a purely European phenomenon. By tracking the histories of empire, nationalism, and
imperialism, they have shown the heterogeneous territorial spread of medieval histories.
While Howe treats England as a postcolony of the Roman imperium, Kabir analyses
the ways in which notions of medievalism guided the educational or land reform works

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of British administrators, Henry Maine, and Thomas Macaulay. D’Arcens extends the
scope of Victorian medievalism to a settler colonial context, through her analysis of
John Woolley and George Arnold Wood, both professors of Sydney University from
the 1850s onward. Engaging Woolley’s reading of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls, D’Arcens
demonstrates the nineteenth-century scholarly recasting of Tennyson’s literary rendering
of the Arthurian past to make it relevant to the conditions on the ground in Australia.
Likewise, Wood used another important medieval figure, St. Francis of Assisi, to oppose
Australia’s involvement in the ‘immoral’ Boer War of 1899–1902 (D’Arcens 2010). While
installing the European medieval as a resource in modern narratives of the nation,
medievalisms such as Woolley’s or Wood’s effaced another medieval – that of the
Australian Aboriginal’s from the national narrative.
In sum, it may be argued that the traffic between medieval and postcolonial studies
takes many routes. For some scholars, it is not so much a question of describing the
so-called Middle Ages in their own terms as asking what contemporary purpose such
a periodizing device served. For others, the project is to deploy some of the tools of
postcolonial theory to describe and analyse the so-called medieval period.

Postcolonial histories and empire

Over the last three decades, the historical subfield, new imperial history, has consolidated
itself in the academy. Not all the work conducted in this field would fall under the
rubric of postcolonial history. But contributions by Catherine Hall, Kathleen Wilson,
Antoinette Burton, Ann Stoler, and Nicholas Dirks speak to the close linkages between
postcolonial history writing and new imperial history.
According to Antoinette Burton, a leading practitioner in both fields, new imperial
history developed as a response to ‘the imperial turn’ that she defined as ‘the accelerated
attention to the impact of histories of imperialism on metropolitan societies in the
wake of decolonisation, pre- and post-1968 racial struggle and feminism in the last
quarter century’ (Burton 2003: 2). The similarity in the intellectual genealogies of new
imperial and postcolonial histories, evident in Burton’s statement, was clarified further
by Kathleen Wilson when she observed that ‘Energized by the political and imaginative
wakes of postcolonial and cross-disciplinary scholarship, … “new imperial history” …
has at its heart the importance of difference … that supports and extends the pluralities
of historical interpretation’ (Wilson 2004: 2–3). Difference was central to imperial
projects and policies; it was one of the central justifications for European domination of
the backward races.
New imperial historians analysed the historical deployment of difference as
a hierarchical category that separated colonizer from colonized. They were also
committed to analysing the ways in which empires led to the circulation of European
peoples, institutions, customs, laws, religions, around the globe and the ‘contribution
of these extended territories and peoples’ to the formation of ‘national’ cultures within
Europe. Such an orientation produces a critical stance among new imperial historians
towards other practitioners of imperial history. For example, new imperial historians of

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the British Empire are critical of projects such as the five-volume Oxford History of the
British Empire. The latter regarded the British empire as a ‘series of discrete components
of limited relevance to the study of Britain, rather than … a permeable web or network
shaped by global and regional currents, that impacted metropolitan as much as colonial
culture’ (cited in Wilson 2004: 14). Finally, new imperial historians are particularly
committed to studying the internal difference between imperial projects. For example,
eighteenth-century accounts abounded in references to ‘the empire of the seas’, ‘the
empire of the east’, and to the ‘New World Dominions’. These ‘empires’ were by no means
identical, even though there were points of commonality, and all of them profoundly
shaped the formation of British or other metropolitan imperial identities.
Readers will recall that the question of historical difference – both its existence and
blurring – is central to the project of postcolonial history writing. Postcolonial historians
do not treat the difference between the colonizer and colonized as a Manichean separation.
Related to this is a deep investment in understanding the processes of translation of
universal categories in particular locales and languages across different historical time
periods. Colonialism, as both postcolonial and new imperial historians demonstrate, was
far from being a monolithic entity. The emphasis of both types of revisionist scholarship
is to explore the tensions of empire, rather than its triumphs alone.
Before turning to a more detailed analysis of some postcolonial approaches to
histories of empire, let me point out a slight difference in emphasis between new imperial
historians and their postcolonial counterparts. For the new imperial historian the main
focus of attention is the imperial formation(s), a term used first by Mrinalini Sinha – a
model that allows for the different trajectories of metropole and colony while insisting
that both were constituted by a history of imperialism, a point that has since then also
been made by Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (Sinha 1995; Cooper and Stoler 1997).
The historians in question strenuously argue in favour of shifting analytical focus away
from the nation form – both colonizing and colonized – to empire seen as an organic
(if uneven) relationship between metropole and colony. They are critical of notions of
splendid isolation of any colonizing nation state, and are committed to demonstrating
the close linkages, indeed the mutually constitutive role, between ideas of empire/colony
and nation/empire.
Postcolonial historians in turn take colonialism, decolonization, and neo-colonial
practices as their object of study. But their fundamental unit of analysis is the nation state,
not so much as an entity they celebrate, but as an apparatus that often fails to live up to its
promises due to endemic historical reasons. As they illustrate the links between colony
and postcolony, postcolonial historians focus on the ways in which colonial categories
were operationalized on the ground by the natives, often described by the colonizers as
uncivilized or backward. But at that moment of encounter ‘colonial oppositions were
crossed and hybridized’ (Prakash 1995: 3). Thus every colonial category has written into
its history the story of the native’s appropriation, resistance, and translation. The task
of postcolonial history is to read these hybrid pasts for a richer understanding of the
present. And it is in their mutual commitment to analysing the history of colonialism as
one of encounter that brings together postcolonial and new imperial histories.

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As Edward Said remarked, the work of postcolonial criticism was fuelled by the
recognition ‘that even though a hard and fast line separated colonizer from colonized
in matters of rule and authority (a native could never aspire to the condition of the
white man), the experiences of ruler and ruled were not so easily disentangled. On both
sides of the imperial divide men and women shared experiences – though differently
inflected experiences – through education, civic life, memory, war’ (Said 2000). Said’s
argument, I propose, is equally applicable to new imperial histories. It comes as no
surprise therefore that many postcolonial and new imperial historians are critical of
viewpoints articulated by imperial historians Peter Marshall, Niall Ferguson, Linda
Colley, and David Cannadine whose writings, they would argue, add up to supporting
the following propositions: (i) developments in the empire were not that relevant to the
trajectory of British history at home; (ii) there prevailed among many – both historians
and the public – a belief in the beneficial effects of empire. Issuing a strong critique of
the historians in question Edward Said noted, ‘A generation ago the influence of Fanon’s
typology of empire ensured that one could only be either very much for or very much
against the great imperial structures’. Writing in 2003, from the vantage of American
imperial mis(adventures), Said observed with some irony that ‘the empires that ruled
Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad’. The ‘perplexingly affirmative work of Niall
Ferguson and David Armitage scants’, he wrote, ‘if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the
suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about
the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they
maintained. A crucial tactic of this revisionism is to read present-day American imperial
power as enlightened and even altruistic, and to project that enlightenment back into
the past’ (Said 2000).

Postcolonial histories, migration, and settler societies

New imperial history does not exhaust histories of imperialism and post-imperialism
written from a postcolonial vantage. Andrea Smith’s edited volume Europe’s Invisible
Migrants analyses European returnees from Indonesia, Algeria, Angola, and Mozambique
after the collapse of colonial empires in these countries (Smith 2003). These groups
numbering some 5–7 million were not repatriates but ex-settlers for whom ‘return’ to
Europe was not a choice. Frederick Cooper explained the lack of scholarly interest in
these groups to their postcolonial status. ‘The very distinctiveness that the Indonesian
Dutch, Angolan Portuguese, or Algerian French had asserted’, writes Cooper, ‘no longer
had legitimacy in a decolonizing world: they were people who had no right to exist’.
Their return to France, the Netherlands, and Portugal was not due to any ‘profound
sentiment’ associated with life in these places but on more ‘abstract affinities of race and
citizenship’ (Cooper 2003: 169–70).
Postcolonial thought has influenced the writing of revisionist history of countries
considered marginal to Europe, such as Turkey or what in some diplomatic circles is
cynically referred to as PIGS (Europe’s ‘south’, consisting of Portugal, Italy, Greece, and
Spain). Much of this work is a postcolonial, intellectual/ literary history that interrogates

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Eurocentrism through revisionist readings of European literary and philosophical

traditions from the vantage point of Europe’s borders or margins (Chabal 2003).
By way of concluding this discussion on postcolonial and imperial histories, we
must acknowledge the work of historians of white settler colonies, namely Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand. Even though these countries did not go through a political
decolonization movement, settler culture in the three aforementioned countries has been
seriously called into question by a process of, what the historian Miranda Johnson has
described as, ‘ethical’ decolonization – a sustained and continuing process of questioning
the past assumptions of white supremacy by dialogue between and across different
socio-cultural communities. Historians such as Bain Attwood, Fiona Magowan, Marilyn
Lake, and others have combined a postcolonial outlook with an awareness promoted by
pioneering figures like Henry Reynolds to turn the history of these settler societies ‘not
upside down, but inside out’ (Reynolds 2006: 199). Thanks to the efforts of historians
like Reynolds and others ‘History has become a matter of fierce public debate in the
three settler states of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand’ (Johnson 2008: 97). Aspects
of indigenous-settler relations are often the subject of public debate in the media,
documentary, and feature films. The case of the so-called ‘stolen generations’, Aboriginal
children forcibly removed from their parents and raised by settlers, is a telling example
of a subject that has most recently fuelled ‘history wars’ in Australia. These efforts have
undoubtedly gone a long way towards transforming these settler states into postcolonial
states by helping raise public awareness of colonial/Aboriginal issues.
No discussion of postcolonial history’s impact is complete without referencing
histories of gender. The Martinique-born anti-colonial intellectual Frantz Fanon’s
scathing indictment of French colonialism in A Dying Colonialism begins with a
discussion of the role of women, in particular the veiled Algerian Muslim woman, in the
armed struggle for Algerian liberation. The veil, (and by implication the woman under
the veil), argued Fanon, constituted the ideological battleground between the colonizer
and colonized, the former claiming to stand for progress and depicting the latter as
representing stasis. Questions of tradition, modernity, patriarchy, racialism, agency, and
oppression are all intimately bound up with the colonial discourse about gender.
The problem of the veiled woman appears like a microcosm that contained many
of the themes that postcolonial historians of gender continue to grapple with. On the
one hand, the category of the ‘veiled woman’ raises questions about representation
and the particular condition of subalternity for the ‘Third World Woman’ which in
turn folds back into the problem of empire. On the other hand, historians critical of
the stereotype of the veiled or Third World woman have expended their energies in
search for the ‘real’ woman (behind the veil/or unveiled). These efforts have produced a
whole raft of possibilities for thinking through postcolonial modernities. Despite their
differences, the many approaches to the history of gender signal that this has been an
area in which postcolonial historians have had a noticeable imprint. Briefly, these may
be summarized as the question of the Third World woman; the role of gender in the so-
called civilizing mission; gender in nationalist discourse; gender as the site for a ‘clash
of civilisations’.

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Postcolonial history now

Europe

Having outlined some of areas in which postcolonial historiography has been most
productive, it is important to ask if the field continues to be relevant in our times. Or, has
postcolonial history been overshadowed by theories of globalization? In this context, it
is useful to remind ourselves of the French theorist Etienne Balibar’s call, issued in the
context of debates about a ‘fortress Europe’, for a global recognition of our postcolonial
condition (Balibar 2003). ‘[W]hat has truly unified the planet’, argued Balibar, ‘is not
just colonial expansion, but the revolts, the liberation struggles that put into question
the notion of “different natures” that separate peoples of the “metropoli” from those of
the colonies, producing a dialectic between these two demographic groups that results
in a reversal of roles, a “particularizing” of the old metropolis and a “universalisation”
of the former colonies.’ By ‘universalisation’ of former colonies, Balibar alludes to the
waves of migration of people from the global South and ex-colonies, people belonging
to diverse cultures, with varied family and religious values, into post-Maastricht Europe
(Balibar 2003).
For scholars such as Etienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Nielson, Joan Scott,
and Naomi Davidson the critical historical knots that need unravelling in the context
of the ‘new’ Europe are notions of borders, migration, and citizenship. During the
colonial ventures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europe distinguished itself
physically and culturally from the rest of the world by drawing political borders. This
was an attempt to ‘appoint itself the center of the world’ as well as a strategy to ‘divide
up the earth’ into nation states modelled after the European pattern (Balibar 2004: 7).
Colonialism, writes Balibar, ‘was at once a way to organize the world’s exploitation and to
export the “border form” to the periphery, in an attempt to transform the whole universe
into an extension of Europe’. The process continued into decolonization and formed
the basis for a new international order. Yet, ‘in a certain sense it was never completely
achieved’ (Balibar 2004: 7) for the new nation states were not homogenous, sovereign
states but agglomerates of diverse populations – Israel, India, West and East Pakistan
(which later became Bangladesh) as well as several eastern European states.
The demographic and cultural diversity of European populations many of whom are
‘postcolonial’ – a result of immigration, repatriation of displaced peoples, and colonial
returnees – reflect a projection of ‘global diversity’ within Europe. The different modes
by which European residents from ‘other’ countries are designated in the context of
different European states – ethnic minorities, immigrés, extracommunatari, Ausländer
– show the fragility of the European Union (EU). The EU appears unresolved on the
question of the outsider, the ‘less than white (sous blanc), … neither white, nor secular,
nor Christian’ (Balibar 2004: 44). If the EU were to remain, it needs to reconcile the
question of how certain ‘fundamental anthropological differences’ (those of sexuality,
culture, and religion) will be respected in tandem with the universal rights of citizenship.
The challenge facing Europe is one that Frantz Fanon had written about in a slightly

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different register in The Wretched of the Earth: to seek a fulfilment of its destiny as the
bearer of universal values by taking lessons from postcolonial developments both within
its borders as well as from other parts of the ex-colonized world.
The uneven regression of the welfare state, migration from ex-colonized countries,
war-torn states in the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Europe, deindustrialization
that has accompanied economic globalization, rising unemployment, and the fear of a
global Islamic terrorism have contributed to the rise of racist and xenophobic politics in
many European nation states, making the question of membership to the EU a vexed one.
Policing of borders has intensified along with the expansion of zones of ‘nonrights’ in the
suburbs of many great European cities. This context makes clear why the quintessential
postcolonial question, one harking back to the days of decolonization, about how we
reconcile ideas about the universal rights of man with cross-cultural diversity looms
large in these global times. Gayatri Spivak argued that the ‘universal’ political subject
of modernity, whose institutional expression is the citizen, is always geopolitically
differentiated. Scholars are now documenting the histories of scores of nationals from
‘third countries’ who have lived for one or several generations on European soil, and who
are indispensable to European conceptions of well-being, culture, tolerance, and civility
(Balibar 2004; Scott 2004). The plight of displaced peoples in the ex-metropole and the
interference of the ex-metropole in the politics and economies of the ex-colonies signal
‘the extreme ambivalence of (Europe’s) relationship with the colonial past’. This makes
Europe ‘the postcolonial locus par excellence’ whose future depends, in large measure,
on how its leaders recognize and grapple with these political realities.

Asia

Borders, migration, and traffic in human beings are also emergent issues in historical
discussions on Asia. Practitioners of postcolonial and connected histories have broached
the question of ‘Asian’ regionalism, but with significant differences in emphases. In a
provocatively titled essay, ‘One Asia or Many?’, Sanjay Subrahmanyam demolishes
notions of an Asian unity. A pioneer of ‘connected history’, Subrahmanyam (2016: 34)
tracks networks and the circulation of texts and peoples, from the sixteenth century
onwards, only to conclude that

if there were some extraordinarily powerful networks and circuits that crossed
early modern political boundaries in Asia, whether for political, military, or
commercial reasons, we must also be aware of the limits of these networks and
circuits. Not everything was connected, and not all of the time.

Any notion of a unified Asia evaporates in the heat of ‘Islamophobia and barely mitigated
racist and patronizing stereotypes regarding the Central Asian peoples’. In thinking thus,
Subrahmanyam shares common ground with scholars Wang Hui and John Steadman
who argue against ‘any attempt to characterize Asia as a unitary culture’ (Subrahmanyam
2016: 40).

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Postcolonial historians share in this interest of an Asian region, but they approach the
problem from a different vantage. Asian unity or its absence is less of a concern for them
than are the meanings that inhere in proclamations of an Asian regionalism or in those
of India and China as future superpowers of the twenty-first century. In contrast to a
formation such as the EU, writes Prasenjit Duara (2010: 981), ‘region formation in Asia
is a multipath, uneven, and pluralistic development’. It is marked, on the one hand, by an
imagination of certain national identities such as Indian or Chinese assuming global scope
transcending, as it were, the territorial limits of their nation states. He cites chauvinistic
articles in contemporary media as evidence of such imaginations. Invocations of the
‘pravasi bharatiya’ (non-resident Indians) or huaren, haigui (global Chinese) signal ‘a
neoliberal model of globalisation’ that coincides with ‘state withdrawal in many areas
of provisioning public goods, such as education and health care’ (Duara 2010: 979). By
contrast, the fate of less-qualified peoples who migrate as seasonal or domestic workers,
Malayalis to the Gulf states of West Asia, Rohingyas to Thailand, or Bangladeshis to
India, are precarious. True, their wages help in shoring up family fortunes in their home
countries. But these (often undocumented) populations are subject to untold brutality in
the hands of labour contractors, local police, and political groups.
Prasenjit Duara and Sangita Gopal have also commented on the creation of an Asian
cultural consumption zone through media. The wide popularity of Korean television
serials in East Asian countries, Korean action films adapted by Bollywood, and the large
Indian and Bangladeshi following of Pakistani soap operas are cited as cases as also the
wide popularity of manga, anime, and other mediatized commodities (Gopal 2016).
These together with ‘extraterritorial’ metropolises constituted by the flow of labour,
capital, and knowledge make up new ‘intra-Asian’ zones such as Bipolis and Fusionopolis
in Singapore (Duara 2010: 978). Instead of reading these flows as culminating in the
creation of a new, unified Asian identity, Duara (2010: 982) prefers Gayatri Spivak’s
refusal to name an entity, thereby resisting demarcation, preferring instead ‘to deal with
“Asia” as the instrument of altered citation: an iteration’.

Coda: Looking ahead

To be sure, the circulation of peoples, ideas, and goods is not unique to the twenty-
first century. The histories of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Islam
bear ample testimony to the spread and circulation of people, texts, ideas, and faiths.
The question facing historians today is how to analyse present-day Asian cultural
identities that are shaped by ‘circulations of culture, knowledge, technology, goods,
services, and finance that are dizzying in their velocity while also … deeply commodified
or consumerist’ (Duara 2010: 983). Put differently, what if any will be the normative
contributions to global political thought of a putative Asian century?
Citing the example of the anti-colonial Indian intellectuals who internalized elements
of Western political thought and humanism so deeply that they would deploy those same
ideas to critique the excesses of British imperialism, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012a: 141)

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asks if India and China, as ascendant nation states today, have the capacity to generate
‘new visions of humanity’. The contemporary moment, racked as it is ‘by problems
of planetary proportions: climate change, food security, global refugees and asylum
seekers, failed states, and terrors of various kinds’, urgently requires projects of justice
and fairness that are global in scope (Chakrabarty 2012a: 151). We live in times when
the hegemony of the nation state form is such that statelessness is almost a new form of
being ‘savage’ (Chakrabarty 2012b: 7). In these conditions, the urgent question facing
postcolonial scholars is whether the new global powers and their intelligentsias – Indian,
Chinese, or any other – will continue to pursue the American model of domination while
their normative visions remain those that became ‘global during the era of European
ascendancy’ (Chakrabarty 2012a: 151).
In writing thus, however, we also reach a limit point of postcolonial history writing. The
subject of this history is unremittingly focused on humans who live in an international
world divided into nation states. Jeremy Bentham, it is widely accepted, coined the word
‘international’ in 1780. Disputing the view that Bentham’s coinage was a translation of
the Roman ‘ius gentium’, Hidemi Suganami (1978: 231) argues that Bentham ‘reserves the
term international for relations between sovereigns as such, maintaining that transactions
between private individuals belonging to different states, or those between the sovereign
of one state and a private individual of another, are concerns not of international, but
of internal jurisprudence’. Bentham himself argued that a new word was necessary to
‘express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which goes commonly under the
name of law of nations’. The latter was ‘an appellation so uncharacteristic’, that, were
it ‘not for the force of custom, it would seem rather to refer to internal jurisprudence’
(Suganami 1978). Bentham came up with the expression international in the era of
empires at a time when the first wave of colonialisms was ending in Latin America and
North America, and the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese were spreading their
political and commercial tentacles into Asia. The concept of international, in this coinage,
was thus inseparable from ideas of both empires and nation states. And sovereignty was
the mediating link between these ideas.
Does it, however, make sense to speak of the international in these Benthamite
terms in today’s context? If the international only makes sense in a conversation
between sovereigns, then what of those who have been rendered stateless by failed
states, national governments, climate crises, and myriad other forms acting singly or
in combination? Postcolonial history’s salutary lesson has been to remind us that it is
not nation states alone, but a deeper predicament produced by the conflicting forces
of neoliberal capitalism, failed states, demography, and environmental crises that have
pushed to the brink not only stateless peoples, illegal migrants, guest workers, and
asylum seekers – ‘today’s subalterns’ who ‘embody the human condition negatively, as an
image of privation’ but also plants, birds, fish, animals, and other forms of life, in a word,
the worlds of the non-human (Chakrabarty 2012b: 7; Duara 2015). While postcolonial
historiography helps us make sense of the privations borne by human beings it has yet to
come up with an adequate vocabulary for speaking about the non-human. The task that
awaits the next generation of postcolonial historians is to put the history of nation states

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into a dialogue with the problems that are of planetary proportions, to bring into the
ambit of its analysis both the human being as subject and the human being as a member
of a nexus of biological species whose activities have precipitated environmental and
other crises on a planetary scale.

Comment

Prasenjit Duara
Rochona Majumdar has written an admirable and comprehensive analysis of postcolonial
historical writing, admirable particularly because there are no easy ways of defining or
even delimiting the scope of ‘postcolonial’ historiography. Yet she has succeeded in
addressing the roots, the affinities with poststructuralism and mutual influences between
it and the histories of everyday life, the subaltern (including in Latin America), Marxism,
gender, environment, medieval history, new imperial history, global history, and more.
Furthermore, she demonstrates the principal tenets of postcolonial history through the
writings about gender. In her essay, she poses a 4-D cross-section of global perspectives
on the figure of woman that can best be grasped by a postcolonial understanding of
modernity: gender in the civilizing mission; gender in nationalist patriarchal discourse;
and gender as the site for the clash of civilizations (white men and women saving brown
women from brown men). To understand this figure, we need a layered analysis of
legacies of empire and colonialism connecting different parts of the world over the last
couple of centuries.
At its most basic level, postcolonial history reveals that the contemporary world,
including most especially, the de-colonized nation states, still operates within the mental
and often the material framework (institutions and laws) of the colonial masters they
strove so hard to expel in the mid-twentieth century. Much of this legacy derives from
Enlightenment ideals both in its liberatory rhetoric and its dark underbelly linked to
the imperatives of capitalism. By sanctioning property rights, economic individualism,
legal rights as a measure of civilization and sovereignty and not least, the untrammelled
conquest of nature, it facilitated the exploitation of other people, lands, and nature. In
several ways, postcolonial thought refers to this hitherto underexplored or even unthought
nexus, especially as postcolonial nation states adopt it in its alluring rhetorical package.
Yet few of the historians described by Majumdar and others, including myself, will
readily assume the self-description as postcolonial historians, particularly during the
early period of its emergence in the 1990s. Thus, Gayatri Spivak in an interview famously
declared that postcolonial theory is ‘bogus’ (Spivak 1999: 358). Others, such as Michael
Dutton, Leela Gandhi, and Sanjay Seth have described it simply as a ‘toolbox’ to explore
perspectives alternative to hegemonic modernity (Dutton, Gandhi, and Seth 1999: 121–
2). My late colleague from the University of Chicago, Professor Bernard Cohn, once
likened these scholars in a conversation to the cat that has climbed (been chased?) up a
tree and does not know how to come down. I have often tried to reflect on this curious

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disavowal. In the rest of this comment, I will probe the reasons for it, the scope and status
of postcolonial history and my own effort to grasp its relevance to contemporary life.
The most important reason for the reticence regarding postcolonialism is that
it is not a theory; it is a perspective pointing to another cosmology. A theory, in the
contemporary sense, is a mid-level epistemic statement – by which I mean that it accepts
the axioms of secular rationality. This statement not only explains the structure and
dynamics of a phenomenal cluster, it also presents solutions or ways of resolving the
problems encountered therein – a way for the cat to climb out. On the other hand, it
is very difficult – though by no means impossible – to find alternative solutions drawn
from the vanquished and delegitimated cosmologies from the past. In some ways,
postcolonialism is similar to Derridean deconstructive poststructuralism which does
not seek to provide resolutions in any ordinary or causal sense, although, to be sure, not
all poststructuralisms share this quality.
Postcolonial histories function more like cosmological pathways. The critique of
modern practices reveals the highly damaging and exorbitant effects of modernization
particularly upon the lower orders of society. Take the case of the ‘anti-superstition and
build schools’ movement that took place in China from the beginning of the twentieth
century through the Communist revolution. The smashing of idols and temples and
their replacement by modern schools and police in Republican and Communist China
entailed very high costs for the peasants. They were deprived of their temple market
fairs, community life, social networks, and religious anchors. Besides, they had to pay
exorbitant new taxes for the additional bureaucracy even while the schools and police
did not necessarily benefit ordinary peasants. In these and other ways, regarding women
for instance, as suggested by Majumdar, a pathway is opened up that leads to the critique
of the modern complex. But a critique is only a critique.
In some formulations of the critique, tools for reconstruction are drawn from
other theoretical models. Thus, a left-wing postcolonial historian may suggest that if
the modernizers had been attuned to class issues, the education of peasants need not
have been so dysfunctional. Or that it may have been an aspect of primitive capital
accumulation necessary for all modern societies. Others may argue that with more
resources available – after all Western imperialism did bankrupt the late Qing state –
modernization could have been more painless. Yet others like the twentieth-century
Confucian-Buddhist thinker and rural reformer, Liang Shuming, urged that while some
reform was necessary, it was more important to restore the rural order so that peasants
could live more organically with their built environment (He 2002: 11–2). It is in these
ways that postcolonialism is also thought of as a ‘toolbox’.
But postcolonialism is not merely a critique of the gap between the ideals and practices
of modernity. It suggests a deeper cosmological critique – which can suggest that the
gap itself is part of the package of modernity – and its pathways point to a different
cosmology. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007: 71) has suggested, postcolonialism evokes
modes of apprehending the world that are at considerable distance from the logics of
modern society and Enlightenment rationality. To use social science etic categories
to grasp this universe of meaning and practice is at best to distance oneself from its

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meaning and experience, and at worst, an epistemic violence whereby these modes of
knowing are denigrated and/or become opportunities for their elimination.
Perhaps the academic discipline most sensitive to the problem of epistemic violence –
and hence closest to postcolonial studies – is the school of cultural anthropology that may
be traced to Franz Boas’s move from Germany to the US academia in the early twentieth
century. Boaz developed the Herderian tradition of ‘culture’ as a human phenomenon
that is not reducible to civilizational notions of evolution and progress. The more recent
history of this tendency may be found in the movement among cultural anthropologists
of the 1990s towards the ‘reflexive turn’ when the scholar turned the lens back on herself
to grasp her ways of knowing the society to be studied. This movement tended to lapse
into a solipsistic stance. The present trend towards the ‘ontological turn’, particularly in
the work of Bruno Latour and his colleagues, may be seen as the inheritor of this effort to
apprehend if not understand the radically other in its own mode of existence.
There are two significant novelties in this position. First, the ‘other’ includes not only
people, but things, plants (e.g. trees), and animals. These anthropologists and science
and technology studies’ scholars seek to show how in non-modern societies, the culture/
nature, subject/object, and human/non-human divisions of what Latour (2013: 7–11)
calls the Modern ideology are non-existent (in the same ways). These relations are fluid
and relational and the human is seen as a part of the complex world of nature and artifice.
Unlike modern man who is creator (after God) and controller, the shaman and the chief,
for instance, are conduits for these wider forces.
Second, the emphasis is not on some unified cultural system of ‘other’ peoples, but
how their actions are conditioned by their reality viewed through their material and
practical circumstances. The ethnographer who is charged with a high degree of critical
self-reflexivity regarding his own modernist assumptions seeks to probe this alternative
reality complex and hopes for the best kind of understanding. While this represents
advances in understanding the ‘other’, yet the effort among some of these researchers to
root the understanding in reality/ontology that escapes human subjective formatting of
this reality is deeply unrealistic. What Latour calls modern ideology that divides reality
into the subject-object binary itself plays a role in the process of the real.
It may well be that ethnography can approach the reality of the radically Other better
than other disciplines – certainly not many disciplines are committed to this task. But
the professional discipline of history has no such privilege nor does it easily preserve
the voices and actions of different worlds in the archive. While historians have done
remarkable work in the history of the environment in recent years, this history remains
physical and institutional. How the historical ‘other’ has perceived and understood
their relation to the natural and social environment is much harder to access. These
are methodological problems which subaltern historians in South Asia and elsewhere,
particularly Latin America, have striven to overcome. But the weight of interpretation in
reading these materials against the grain is necessarily great.
In recent decades, the fundamental critique embedded in postcolonial thought has
revealed itself as a yawning maw that has the capacity to swallow the world as we know
it. I refer here to the environmental and climate crisis of our time which some of the

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deepest critics of colonial modernity – such as Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma

Gandhi – predicted almost a century ago. Their critique was as much about colonialism
as it was about the logics of capitalist modernity: a rapidly accelerating transformation
of nature and society driven by fossil fuels and unconstrained greed. To be sure many in
the West, particularly the Romantics and American Transcendentalists, were also moved
by similar insights. But the perspective from the colonized side of the world arguably
produced a more comprehensive vision of the massive disruptions to a more nature-
based order of the old society.
I believe that postcolonial historical writing would do well to align itself with this
most powerful critique of modernity that may be found in its repertoire. At the simplest
level, few non-modern cultures and cosmologies were grounded in the hubris that
humans were free to conquer nature. Doubtless this idea which spread in the modern
West had to do with the disenchantment of the world which was an important condition
for the emergence of modernity, but some have argued that it also had to do with the
Abrahamic conception of an absolute God who makes nature available to man for his
purposes. Indeed, one might argue that the disenchanted vision replaced God with the
human, particularly the scientific, rational human. Gilles Deleuze (2001: 71) puts this
well: ‘But did we kill God when we put man in his place and kept the most important
thing, which is the place?’
The idea that humans and natural beings were part of one interfluent and processual
activity was true not only for pantheistic or animistic communities, they were also
central to cosmologies in premodern China and India. In Chinese cosmology, nature
represented the greatest of all living organisms and its governing principles had to be
understood so human life could live in harmony with it (tianren heyi). The process of
self-formation was inseparable from nature. In most Indic cosmologies, the social and
moral order was seen as a correlate of the natural order, and both reflected the unity of
an inner order.
To be sure cosmological ideas of revering nature do not necessarily translate into
reverential practices on the ground. Population pressure and state-driven imperatives to
open more and more natural spaces for human settlement in imperial China and other
parts of Asia, for instance, led to periodic ecological crises with Malthusian consequences.
Moreover, with the advent of modernization in these societies, postcolonial leaders
were among the most enthusiastic advocates of exploiting nature and transforming
the commons for the purposes of national wealth and power. But in many parts of the
developing world where marginal populations most often feel the brunt of the devastation
of the environment, these cosmological and religious ideas are often the only resource
they possess to protect their livelihoods. In many parts of the world, communities are
resisting efforts to exploit or industrialize their natural resources by appealing to the
sacrality of these commons. Daoism, animism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism
are utilized to protect resources of community by using terminology of sacred homeland,
community forests, holy waters to oppose local environmental ravaging.
Across Asia, folk religion, lineages, fengshui, indigenous traditions, symbols, and
rituals (Catholic mass, parades, funerals, ritual theatre, martial arts performances that

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can turn into real resistance) have played a significant role in framing, empowering, and
enhancing the solidarity of local environmental movements since the 1980s. Cambodia
and Thailand’s forest monks led grass-roots movement of robing and sacralizing trees.
Today this has emerged as a community movement among forest dwellers across
several parts of Indochina. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks have evolved a philosophy
of development geared to meeting local needs through appropriate technology. In
India where the environment movement is probably the strongest among developing
countries, local communities and activists build closely upon sacred geography –
‘a living landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests and villages are elaborately
linked to the stories of the gods and heroes’ (Eck 2012: 4–5). Here also many Hindu
groups have refashioned themselves as environmental protection groups. In several
cases, these movements converge with the strong Gandhian movement for rural and
environmental recovery. Taiwan is witnessing the most progressive environmental
movement in Asia led by its various new or resurgent Buddhist societies. The hugely
popular groups with millions of followers such as the Ciji, Fagu, and Foguan, which
have also extended their activities into mainland China and elsewhere, have developed
robust environmental agendas known as huanbao (protect the environment) that
have become one of the most important planks and new spaces of sacrality for the
Buddhist movement.
How does history enter the picture? Through my recent work, I have learnt that the
historical is not something that simply happened in the past. The idea of the past as dead
and subject to clinical analysis is perhaps a necessary aspect of our scientific endeavour,
but it does not capture the way the past enters the present (Certeau 1988: 56–60). The past
represents a cultural and practical repertoire that is always emergent (or re-emergent).
The philosophy of emergence, central to complexity theory, has been developed in
science studies by scientists and philosophers of science greatly inspired by the work of
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), the mathematician and philosopher of science.
To simplify drastically, Whitehead’s ideas belong to the minor Western tradition of
process philosophy that rejects the stable subject–object dichotomy. Whitehead reveals
that emergent complexity is not necessarily a directional process with a telos. His ideas
probably did more to reverse the (one-way) subject-to-object vector so dominant since
Kantian philosophy. Indeed, the purposive subject is understood to emerge from the past
activity of the universe just as the objective universe is the product of creative subjects
(Stengers 2011).
Not unexpectedly, process philosophy dominates most Asian philosophical thought,
particularly that of early Buddhist philosophers, the Buddha and Nagarjuna (second
century CE). Without immersing the reader in this track, suffice it to say that the Buddhist
doctrines of conditioned and interdependent arising represent parallel methodologies
and are useful for thinking of the past as the repertoire of emergence. Yet of course, the
emergent entity or event is always novel because it is diverse ‘from the “many” which
it unifies’ (Whitehead). The historical lesson we take here is not that there is always a
conditioning past from which new events arise, but that the conditioning includes a
selective projection of the past to address the present and future.

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Projective histories necessarily carry a strong subjective or emic element in their

representation of the past. But they also have powerful reality effects that shape future
histories. All the same, we as historians cannot avoid our own conditioning by the
profession of history which has helped us chart the way in our time. It is difficult to always
keep projective histories apart from the professional historian’s more objective treatment
of the past, but the two tend towards opposite poles of the spectrum. Professional history
is a valid enterprise which can be judged by professional standards. It is the business of
the historian to also assess the different goals of the historical project and its capacity
for appropriation.
Let me close with a simple instance taken from recent research. The Prey Lang forests
of northern Cambodia is a vast evergreen forest zone of 3,600 square kilometre with
200,000 people that is being ravaged by logging and dam building. Its communities have
organized a decade-long agenda of protest and protection. The agenda includes frequent
performances of ritual theatre in Phnom Penh’s main public square drawn from their
own traditions as well as organizing forest protection squads that, among other things,
robe the giant trees with Buddhist saffron garments to sacralize them. These communities
are critically assisted by a multi-scale assemblage of civil society organizations ranging
from the local to the global which has brought public – even global – attention and
considerable success to their cause. Not least interesting is that these communities call
themselves Cambodia’s Avatars. Avatar of course is a Hindu-Buddhist term familiar to
them meaning re-incarnated being, but in their ritual performances they refer as much
to James Cameron’s blockbuster film about environmental resistance called Avatar. In
such ways, they hope to widen the meaning of their movement to a global audience
without losing their historical inspiration.

Response

Rochona Majumdar
Prasenjit Duara raises a series of thoughtful and important issues in his response to my
chapter in his brief, but lucid intervention. Instead of responding to his thoughts serially,
let me take up a few themes that I regard as most important in a spirit of discussion.
Duara asks whether or not scholars I have identified as such would regard themselves
as postcolonial. This is followed by a set of key remarks about postcolonialism constituting
‘not a theory’ but ‘a perspective pointing to another cosmology’. To argue about whether
or not a group of practitioners self-identify by a particular moniker is always tricky, and
ultimately futile. For example, in India the category ‘art cinema’ became widely used in
critical and mainstream writing on film ever since Satyajit Ray (1921–92) sailed into
the world with his debut feature film Pather Panchali (‘Song of the Little Road’, 1955).
But most art cinema directors strenuously resisted calling themselves by that name.
Likewise, many regard the epithet feminist as problematic and limited, preferring to
be called womanist, third wave, global-humanist through a variety of arguments that

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gesture towards intersectionality and queerness instead. Their resistance, however, does
not detract from the value of the work done for women and minorities.1
Duara asks if postcolonialism constitutes a body of ‘theory’ as such. As I have used it
in my chapter, and as it informs the scholarship, postcolonialism is a particular vantage
point from which to apprehend the world. In this context, I find film theorist D. N.
Rodowick’s discussion of theory and its salience to the New Humanities instructive.
Rodowick traces the origins of theory to ‘the Greek sense of theoria as viewing,
speculation, or the contemplative life’. Elaborating on it further, he explains that ‘for
Plato, it is the highest form of human activity; in Aristotle, the chief activity of the Prime
Mover. For the Greeks, theory was not only an activity, but also an ethos that associated
the love of wisdom with a style of life or mode of existence’ (Rodowick 2007: 92).
Moving towards the contemporary period, he invokes Raymond Williams who noted
that by the seventeenth century four ‘primary senses’ came to be associated with the
term: spectacle, a contemplated sight, a scheme of ideas, and an explanatory scheme. ‘A
contemporary commonsensical notion’, argues Rodowick (2007: 93), follows from the
last two meanings. Postcolonialism, and the histories written from this perspective, I
submit, retains all four aspects of the term.
The second issue that I want to touch on has to do with Duara’s observations on
the relation between postcolonial history and critiques of modernity. Duara urges
postcolonial historians to align themselves with critical takes on modernity, such as
those articulated by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore and M. K. Gandhi. There were
Western exemplars too, he writes, such as the Romantics and Transcendentalists who
were ‘moved by similar insights’. The ‘West’, however, Duara clarifies, fell far short of most
‘non-modern cultures’ when it came to being critical of a world view governed by ideas
about the ultimate perfectibility of man who could subjugate nature. The distinction that
Duara draws here between the ‘West’ and ‘non-modern cultures’ is too sharp. Figures
such as Tagore and Gandhi from India, or Frantz Fanon from Martinique, have been
analysed by postcolonial thinkers and historians because of the ways in which putative
distinctions between the West and non-West blur and fraternize in their thought.
Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities offers an important corrective to the anti-
Western stance of postcolonial history by bringing to light the lives and careers of
individuals and groups in the West who ‘renounced the privileges of imperialism’ and
sought alliance with those who were ‘victims of their own expansionist cultures’ (Gandhi
2006: 1). She focuses in particular on a group of fin-de-siècle individuals, who were not
known to each other, but forged, sometimes real and at other times only intellectual,
affinities with kindred souls in the colony. Thus M. K. Gandhi and Edward Carpenter,
Aurobindo Ghose and Mira Alfassa, Manmohan Ghose and Oscar Wilde constitute, in
her work, a postcolonial vision of ‘anti-communitarian communitarianism’ (Gandhi
2006: 26). Intellectuals and leaders as varied as Friedrich Engels, Robert Blantchford, V.
I. Lenin, Max Nordau, George Orwell wrote off these examples of fin-de-siècle utopian
thought as too ‘immature’ to ever constitute a model for a productive and transformative
political praxis. Orwell’s dismissive description of these ways of being in the world
is worth citing at length for the bitterness of his invective. Late nineteenth-century

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utopianism, he wrote, was a ‘magnetic field’ that drew towards itself ‘every fruit-juice
drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and
feminist in England’ (Gandhi 2006: 178).
Recently, Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson have drawn attention to
another set of ‘non-players’ they call the ‘green Victorians’. In the same spirit as that of
Gandhi, Tagore, and many lesser-known colonial-era individuals, John Ruskin inspired
a community of students and followers, including one, William Gershom Collingwood,
father of the renowned philosopher of history, Robin George Collingwood, to develop
what they call ‘a culture of sufficiency’ (Albritton and Jonsson 2016: 8). In a historical
epoch that is being identified as one of anthropogenic climate change, that is to say
when human beings are acknowledged as agents wielding geological force, Albritton
and Jonsson recover histories of figures such as Ruskin and Collingwood as models for a
future where we might buy ‘less’ and consume ‘wisely’ for a healthier society and planet.
Reading Ruskin and Robert Somervell’s criticisms of railways as corrupting the ‘moral
character’ of Cumbrians, or their rant against industrial society more generally, reminds
one of M. K. Gandhi’s strident critique of railways, doctors, and lawyers in his 1909
tract, Hind Swaraj. A sentence from Somervell ‘the frenzy of avarice is daily drowning
our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children, and blasting the cultivable
surface of England into a treeless waste of ashes’ could easily be replaced with Gandhi’s
about the ‘evils’ of ‘civilization’ epitomized by the railways that spread the bubonic plague
and famine in many parts of India (Albritton and Jonsson 2016: 97).
These views might indeed be a ‘cosmology’ in Duara’s words. But, such a cosmology
can only be properly understood by taking seriously postcolonial historiography’s
mandate that there were values that many among the colonizer and colonized shared,
in spite of the harsh and cruel power relations that separated them. Postcolonial history
gives us visions of a world imagined by Frantz Fanon – ‘There is no Negro Mission, there
is no white burden’ – even as other histories teach us about a globe geopolitically divided
into West and non-West, European, African, and Asian (Fanon 1967: 228).
Postcolonial theory and history emerged as important themes in the academy in the
last two decades of the twentieth century. Historians influenced by the postcolonial optic
have made fundamental interventions in histories of nationalism, colonialism, gender,
and minority histories, as well as histories of race, caste, and community. As we progress
into the twenty-first century, the exigencies of our times dictate that historians, like
practitioners of other disciplines, calibrate their views. Duara’s singling out of histories
of climate and environment is important in this regard.
I wish to conclude by recalling the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s missive to developed nations
of the world to undertake ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ as they tackle the
challenge of greenhouse gas emissions. To comprehend what the idea of ‘common’ but
‘differentiated’ might look like on the ground brings us once more into the domain of
postcolonial history and theory. As I have argued, postcolonial historians and theorists
are committed to understanding what we share in our past and present even as they
take full account of the fissures that have divided us, sometimes irremediably. As we
face shared crises, whose proportions have spilled from the global into the planetary, it

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is postcolonial history’s burden once more to guide scholars into understanding the full
complexity of that which the Kyoto Protocol described as our ‘common’ responsibility as
we negotiate our teeming differences.

Note

1. The debate around feminism is one that roils the academy and the wider public sphere.
Catherine MacKinnon’s writings brought to the centre of academic and policy debates the
question of women’s rights as human rights. For a summary of positions, see Evans and Bobel
2007, and also Kaminer 1993.

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CHAPTER 3
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
Grégory Quenet

Environmental history (EH) as a self-identified field was born in the United States
at the beginning of the 1970s.1 Before the end of the 1990s, it had little influence on
historical analysis and remained underground.2 However, since the end of the 1990s,
there has been a surge of interest. This new approach to history can be seen in a large
part of the world, even if in some countries permanent positions for environmental
historians are still very recent or limited. Academic recognition and internationalization
raised new questions about the unity and definition of EH. Beyond the auto-referential
concern of a professional community, a more fundamental question emerged about
how the discipline had taken and should take into account environmental issues and
non-human beings. Owing to global climate and environmental change, this debate
is now vibrant both in and outside of the realm of EH, among historians and non-
historians alike. ‘Anthropocene’, ‘Capitalocene’, ‘Plantationocene’, and ‘Chtulucene’
enriched the vocabulary of the humanities and social sciences, and put environmental
perspectives at the top of the theoretical and methodological agenda (Quenet 2017).
Did we, as historians, neglect these issues because of our anthropocentric point of view?
Was history built as a humanist knowledge on the bedrocks of the divide between the
history of humans and the history of nature? Are the humanities and the social sciences
able to integrate non-humans without destabilizing all their theoretical architecture,
or should they call for a re-foundation? All these relevant questions must be precisely
contextualized while remaining respectful of existing attempts to analyse societies in
relation to their environment.3
Environmental history, although non-exhaustive, is a good point from which to
evaluate how empirical studies could deal with the non-human part of history. The
initial assumption of environmental historians was to consider non-human beings, in
a large sense, as actors in history, rather than as merely inert things manipulated by
human actors. This symmetrical perspective revealed an asymmetry of relations because
societies had a strong impact on their environment, which in turn influenced the
course of history. This Copernican turn, from static nature to environmental dynamics,
opened up the way for innovative empirical research on pollution and management,
animals and fish, landscapes and territories, environmental and gender inequalities,
capitalism and the commodification of nature. The subject of this chapter is not
to introduce and summarize this very large set of works but to go deeper, to a more
idiosyncratic understanding of EH. While there are many sophisticated monographs in
the field, there exist few firm theoretical discussions. Moreover, state-of-the-art papers
developed generally a normative approach about the strengths and weaknesses of EH
Debating New Approaches to History

oversimplifying the sedimentation of intellectual and methodological contexts that

shaped the historical question of nature. The empirical productivity of EH was originally
based on disciplinary borders that compensated for imprecise theoretical baselines,
but this conceptual vagueness is no longer sustainable in light of current awareness of
global climate and environmental change that redefined the debate about nature in the
humanities and social sciences. This new context requires a rigorous definition of EH to
be established from the patterns of its existing practice.

Writing the history of non-humans: Between theory and observation

With the growth of visibility in the 1990s came a set of critiques from inside and
outside EH underlining its lack of coherence and significance. Environmental historians
remarked that expansion, both thematically and geographically, highlighted divisions
between researchers who, at the beginning of the field, were unified neither by a common
definition of nature and environment, nor by a clear methodology (Weiner 2005).
Geographers, among others, have criticized the manner in which different disciplines
used to analyse the relations between people and their environment (Williams 1994).
If the first generation of environmental historians quoted anthropologists, geographers,
ecologists, and historians, the subsequent generations did not often refer to the vast
literature on nature and culture available in other disciplines.4 Environmental historians
in general did not produce many conceptual and methodological texts capable of
establishing the foundations of the new field. In order to answer the question of ‘what
is environmental history?’ many took recourse to intellectual mapping rather than
theoretical perspective.5 In spite of sharing a common idea of history from below, EH
was very different from other new fields of the 1970s and 1980s, such as cultural, gender,
and science studies.
The usual introduction to EH for readers is very broad and considers diversity: ‘like
every other subset of history, EH represents different things to different people. Our
preferred definition of the field is the study of the relationship between human societies
and the rest of nature on which they depended’ (McNeill and Mauldin 2015: xvi). This
level of generality didn’t help to situate these perspectives inside historiography. There
exist many works, prior or parallel to EH, that can lay claim to such an analytical approach.
In terms of methodology, geography, anthropology, and cultural ecology are very close
to EH. Among historians, the ‘ecological history’ of Robert Delort and François Walter
proposed exactly the same definition, whereas the content of US ecological history is
quite different (Beck and Delort 1991; Walter 1994; Delort and Walter 2001). In the
former edition of Peter Burke’s volume on new perspectives in history, Richard Grove
(2001) used that definition to include in EH all former attempts to study the relationships
between people and nature from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. A more
elaborate and contextualized definition of EH would have reduced ambiguity at the price
of a less inclusive academic umbrella. If William Cronon’s Western history looked like
EH, his cultural approach was difficult to appropriate for those working on historical

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variations of the physical world, especially with methodology coming from the natural
sciences: ‘The story of human beings working with changing tools to transform the
resources of the land, struggling over how that land should be owned and understood,
and defining their notions of political and cultural community, all within a context of
shifting environmental and economic constraints’ (Cronon 1987: 172).
To counterbalance this vague generality, a thematic definition was usually added,
distinguishing the different aspects of the relationship between human societies and
nature. EH combines the study of material environment as modified by human action,
the influence of environmental factors on human history, and the history of human
thought about the environment (Hughes 2006: 3). This exhaustive and vast description
of what environmental historians are doing left room for diversity, depending on which
segment was being focused on. However, such a tripartite view should not be considered
as purely descriptive, and is not theoretically neutral – the devil is in the structures.
Donald Worster was the first, in a 1988 paper, to propose a triptych for EH, distinguishing
‘natural environments of the past’, from ‘human modes of production’, and ‘perception,
ideology and value’ (Worster 1988). Even if Worster did not refer to Maurice Godelier,
the dialogue with Marxism and the debate about materialism in anthropology was the
intellectual context (Godelier 1977, 1988). This agenda has since weakened, and the
vocabulary has shifted to a more descriptive meaning, such as three ‘clusters’ or ‘themes’;
this, however, merely confused the issue. Are these three relationships only themes that
circumscribe the perimeter of EH, or are they three levels that develop a structural and
hierarchized understanding of societies? Does the material environment introduce the
idea of a reality that human beings did not create, or a physical and cultural point of view
that weakened the idea of nature per se? Despite a general consensus, environmental
historians find themselves situated at different positions along these graduated
theoretical lines.
The key problem of EH is situated at the crossroads of this thematic approach used as
a definition; the main theoretical and methodological debates about the environment6
in the social sciences come together at the articulation and intersection of each cluster.
The idea of three main fields of inquiry – material, institutional, and symbolic – is an
attempt to avoid the main conceptual problem. What is the relation between, on one
side, the material order, and, on the other side, the institutional and symbolic orders? All
environmental historians agree that these segments are not disconnected, but they do
not necessarily agree on the nature of this connection. The problem is usually resolved
practically, through the writing of history and case studies that elucidate an entangled
narrative of interwoven levels or realities (Cronon 1992a). The story of the material
world is always mediated by cultural and intellectual categories carried out by actors who
describe and transform their environment, as well as by historical sources. However, the
existing environment does not determine human institutions. A current of anthropology,
coming from Julian Steward, Marvin Harris, and Roy Rappaport, influenced Worster’s
paper. At different degrees of causality and sophistication, they developed the idea of
adaptation and cultural ecology, a perspective criticized by a large part of anthropology
(Descola 2013b). The dispute between the natural sciences and the social sciences was

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never resolved, and an argument for or from the two cultures of environmental historian
– ecological science and the humanities – was never methodologically established from
sources and archives.
Nevertheless, this theoretical appraisal of EH underestimates the manner in which
the new field is already self-defined by its distinction from existing fields. Historiography
is an essential part of reflexivity, and not only a methodology.7 EH was born out of
critiques of the intellectual and political history that dominated US historiography in the
1960s, and found some inspiration in the histoire totale of the Annales school, the human
geography of Carl Sauer, and cultural ecology as a compromise between ethnology and
ecology. However, none of these references were satisfying, and EH created its own space
between disciplines, a space which was not well identified before the 1990s.
In placing itself between disciplines, EH was able to avoid at least five of the
conceptual traps about nature that embarrassed scholars at the time: theory, harmony,
relativism, naturalization, and objectivity (Quenet 2014: 14–97). Environmentalism
partly explained the lack of theoretical elaboration about the environment. Knowing
from advocacy that something outside of societies existed and had to be protected,
environmental historians did not lose time with the aporetic concept of nature. It was
environmental historians who introduced the idea of power relations between human
and non-human beings. This was the main difference between environmental historians
and the French historians of the Annales school who placed real importance on the
physical and natural world but who were less attentive to such asymmetries. It was close
to new contemporary fields of the 1970s in that its view from below challenged the
view of dominating actors, but it differed in regard to social construction and situated
perspectives. The idea that there existed something that human beings did not create
that could be analysed both as a fact and as a construction kept EH, at least until the end
of the 1990s, far from postmodernism and the linguistic turn. EH helped elaborate an
original methodological approach through the invention of new historical objects and
the reinterpretation of existing case studies. The institutional difficulties of the first two
decades led EH to confine itself to a narrower orientation than its original ambition of
writing a world EH on the longue durée (Worster 1982; Hughes 1984, 2001). The US
identification of the field provided a firm academic foundation while, paradoxically,
avoiding any naturalization of history, as the US definition of ‘nature’ was, more and
more, just one definition among the plurality of definitions found across human
societies. The idiosyncratic narrative form of EH permitted both the use of data coming
from the natural sciences and the development of a comprehensive view of the relations
between human and non-human beings. John Opie, the forgotten founder of the field,
defined EH as a dialectical relation between the two cultures of the natural sciences and
the social sciences (Opie 1983).
This identity gradually weakened. At the end of the 1990s, EH underwent a cultural
turn, followed by a global turn – both represent different ways of dealing with the
contradiction between the universality of physical nature and the diversity of human
societies. The evolution of the environmental movement was part of this divided process
too. Strongly coherent from the US origin of the conservation and park movement,

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global environmental mobilization became more and more diverse and contradictory,
between top and down perspectives, Western urban movement and Third World
environmentalism of the poor (Radkau 2014). In the 2000s, three important articles were
published to address the problem. Ted Steinberg (2002) proposed viewing environment
in terms of the same model as race, class, and gender. Following Anthony Giddens and
William Sewell, he placed ecological factors among structures that constrain human
action and that are reproduced by social institutions. More than a specific type of power,
environment is a way to analyse places and landscapes. Ellen Stroud (2003) rejected
this perspective on the grounds that the generality of power relations implicated in the
definition dissolves the specificity of nature. The word ‘dirt’, for example, is emphasized
in order to accentuate the non-human, material dimensions of EH, the ones that
legitimate the environmental ethics of historians. The divide between nature and culture
is, according to Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde (2007), ‘the problem of the problem of
environmental history’: that is an ontological organization that is supposed to be given
and real, rather than being socially constructed, as is taught by the social sciences. They
encouraged environmental historians to take more inspiration from new social theory,
especially that of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour, and Sheila Jasanoff, as
well as everything related to the history of science and knowledge regimes in general.
Thanks to these debates, EH is more reflexive today than it used to be. But the theoretical
definition is still neither clear nor sustainable. Global climate and environmental change
created a new intellectual context that put pressure on historians to consider the history
of non-humans.

Historians under pressure: The challenge of climate and global

environmental change

With the start of the new millennium a new intellectual and political context arose, one
dominated by global environmental issues and philosophical and anthropological debates.
The radical critique of the division between nature and culture by the French
anthropologists Philippe Descola and, better known internationally, Bruno Latour, had
paradoxical effects on environmental historians.8 On the one hand, their radical critique
of the divide between nature and culture provided philosophical foundations for the
overall history of environmental historians. On the other hand, the habitual definitions of
the relationships between societies and nature collapsed with the categories themselves.
Nature and environment are no longer more than provincial ideas belonging to modern
Western societies, ideas that are unable to describe the common world of non-human
and human beings.9 Environmental historians explored three partial escapes from this
philosophical trap.10 Firstly, they historicized the production of discontinuities between
nature and culture, and elaborated a set of micro divides, contextualized and specific to
different periods and territories. However, this sophisticated empirical approach did not
provide an exit from a Western naturalist perspective. Only non-Western ontologies,
such as that of Amerindians, or perhaps those elaborated prior to the Renaissance,

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could do that. But EH was mainly devoted to contemporary times and the impact of
modernity on nature. Secondly, the history of science allowed environmental historians
to be more reflexive about knowledge regimes at the price of an ambiguous appraisal
of materiality, that is the under-estimation of the environmental dynamics dear to
environmental historians. The double language of the natural sciences and the social
sciences did not become more coherent. Thirdly, an internal perspective that uses its
own vocabulary of historical sources and archives is a respectful way of analysing the
diversity of relationships between humans and non-humans. However, applying the
notion of ‘environment’ to periods that did not use the word reinforces the naturalistic
viewpoint of modern societies and weakens the category of environment.
Global climate and environmental change recomposed the disciplinary and
intellectual frontiers of EH. Environmental historians such as Richard Grove, who
inspired Christopher Bayly and Kenneth Pomeranz (Grove 1995; Bayly 2004: 450;
Pomeranz 2000), contributed to the elaboration of a global historical perspective. This
precursor role masked at least three contradictory ways of considering the global. Firstly,
that world history is the study of historical processes of integration through economy,
culture, and ecology. The expansion of trade and capitalism from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries accelerated environmental changes, and the discovery of the New
World was an ecological shock (Braudel 1981: 69–70; Crosby 1986). Secondly, this
approach is related to a global point of view that highlights historical phenomena that
are not visible at the local, regional, and national scales, especially environmental and
climatic processes. Richard Grove and Mike Davis established new connections between
different parts of the world through the ENSO variation, challenging the interpretation
of social phenomenon such as famine and crisis (Davis 2001; Grove 1998, 2002).
Thirdly, connected history placed different European knowledges and non-European
epistemologies of nature in relation to one another. This new chapter of EH and the
history of science differed from the first model of ecological imperialism in that it was
more symmetrical; it also differed from the diffusionist model (Drayton 2000; Bonneuil
2000; Anker 2001; Livingstone and Withers 2011). Moreover, connecting different
spaces opened up room for at least three different hypotheses, provided that culture was
not reduced to the laws of biology and evolution (Bertrand 2012; Chartier 2006). The
first is related to an anthropological universal that relies on the diversity of cultures and
contexts to explain formal homologies. The second hypothesis concerns forgotten direct
contacts between different spaces, and studies exchanges and reciprocal appropriations
(McNeill 2010). Some works used mainly European sources, whereas others are closer
to connected history. The third hypothesis, ecological polygenesis, assumes that an
identical environmental context will produce identical processes of social and cultural
transformation. In short, global EH is heterogeneous and has not yet stabilized its
definition of ‘global’. In the context of global climate and environmental change, such
ambiguities are no longer sustainable.
At first glance, the Anthropocene hypothesis should be in favour of EH. The idea of a
geological epoch in which humanity exerts a geological force able to modify the climate
of the planet put environment at the core of human history, examining the impact of

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humans on the Earth and the impact of climate on societies. However, this hypothesis
moved EH’s centre of gravity towards Deep History and Big History (Christian 2011;
Smail and Shyrock 2013). It weakened the comprehensive dimension that was present at
the field’s debut, and that was reinforced during the cultural turn of the 1990s.11 The pre-
Anthropocene of Paul Crutzen, Will Steffen, and John McNeill began before agriculture,
with hunter-gatherers, the evolution of the size of the human brain, and the extinction
of the Pleistocene megafauna (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007). Considerations of
the history of evolution and Homo sapiens also form part of the historical agenda of
Dipesh Chakrabarty, despite his (not entirely convincing) attempts to keep his distance
from Big History (Chakrabarty 2014: 1, 2016b).12 In proposing to zoom in and out of
human history in order to combine human inequality and suffering with geological and
evolutionary times, he fails to articulate the relation between the two. This hiatus is one
of the reasons that David Armitage and Jo Guldi are uncomfortable with the concept of
the Anthropocene when the plea is for closer collaborations between history, the natural
sciences, and the cognitive sciences: the Anthropocene is too narrow for Big History and
Deep History, and too large for the usual practice of history (Guldi and Armitage 2014:
65–6, 69–70, 84, 86).
This shift upset the narrative standards that marked the identity of environmental
historians. Local and regional history was now reduced to an effect of global dynamics
(Heise 2008; Hornborg 2010). Primary sources, especially archives, were central to
renewing old historical objects and being reflexive about the effects of printed and
narrative sources. Is a history written from second-hand sources and bibliographical
synthesis a desirable future (Sörlin and Warde 2007: 116)? Historical depth was the way
to answer past challenges to EH without falling into the trap of established patterns. How
is it possible to avoid anachronism if climate change is the gateway to understanding
past societies? The narrative dimension of history was the tool used to include human
and non-human beings in a common history. How could a dominant quantitative point
of view, constructed from ecological balance and natural science data, avoid reducing
non-human beings to an anthropocentric perspective? Manipulating scales helped
environmental historians be attentive to situated experiences and suffering. What is the
place of dominated peoples in a history reduced to a planetary level?
Last but not least, the sudden interest of non-historians in the environment and
climate through time may bring a larger audience and promote debate, but it could also
result in unexpected secondary effects, something like a kiss of death. Bruno Latour
brought a nuanced approach to nature and non-human beings that was missing in EH.
His arguments about the new climatic regime provided a lens to show how the present
was specific and different from the past. Nevertheless, Latour’s use of time is ambiguous,
and one should be wary about any attempt to import his approach into history. For
Latour, time is more of a heuristic tool, one that can be used to change perspectives, than
a social phenomenon to analyse. At least four different temporal regimes are present
in Latour’s thought. The first one concerns the feedback loops of Gaia that abolish the
distinction between past and future. This movement establishes ‘a new and dramatic
connection between powers of action that have until now been unknown, taking place

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at increasingly vast scales, and according to an increasingly frenetic rhythm’ (Latour

2015: 182). The second is ahistorical, as the naturalism of the Moderns was an illusion,
a historical parenthesis to be closed. Analogism and animism survived through art and
images (Heinz and Latour 2012); this permanent coexistence of different ontologies put
an end to the naturalist project of the scientific revolution. The third is a proposition to
reset a technological system. The exhibition and book ‘Reset Modernity’ proposed to
equip the people of Earth with new tools. Literally speaking, the proposition is to return
to the beginning of the sixteenth century, before the triumph of Western Naturalism
and the expansion of European territories in the New World (Latour 2016: 405–9).13 The
fourth is apocalyptical and prophetic, although the telos, or kingdom to come, is neither
clear nor certain (Hartog 2014). All these perspectives are far from the experience of
time as lived by past societies and the analysis of the temporal structures of the social
world familiar to historians. This context pressures historians to answer as historians,
with their own tools and with a clear definition of EH.

The patterns of environmental history

Beyond the specific, shared objectives that define the community of EH, the debate
about nature and history is addressed to all historians. In a famous article, Dipesh
Chakrabarty (2009) challenged the concept of history with four theses: one, that
anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the distinction
between natural history and human history; two, that the idea of the Anthropocene
severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity and globalization; three, that this
geological hypothesis requires historians to put global histories of capital in conversation
with the species history of humans; and four, that the cross-hatching of species history
and the history of capital is a process of probing the limits of historical understanding
(see also Chakrabarty 2012; 2016a, b). The reason for which one of the most famous
representatives of subaltern studies unsettled the local and comprehensive dimension
of history remained unintelligible for many scholars (Vincent 2012). A close study of
the Indian context that gave birth to the first version of this paper, written initially in
Bengali, highlights a more coherent intellectual trajectory than that which appears at first
glance. The fossil-oriented understanding of history in the Anthropocene returned the
Western world, especially England and the United States, to the centre of the process of
modernity. For Chakrabarty, assuming the demographic impact of emergent countries
on the planet’s climate was a way of maintaining a certain idea of provincializing Europe,
and the species concept was a means to avoid a regressive comeback of nations in the
writing of history. The use of this Voltairian tactic of shifting attention away from a weak
point to a new controversy was a success, and the Indian debate was overshadowed by
the impact of the geological turn proposed to the social sciences and to history.
Rather than making previous works obsolete, the rise of the concept of the
Anthropocene should be seen as an opportunity to create a dialogue between EH
and different perspectives about the history of the physical world beyond the limits

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of the Anglophone version. Chakrabarty himself insisted that his statement about the
historiographical hiatus between natural history and human history would require a
deeper analysis than a few references to Giambattista Vico, Benedetto Croce, and Robin
Collingwood (Chakrabarty 2009: 201–7). First trained in India, he is familiar with the
Annales school, the geohistory of Fernand Braudel, and the climate history of Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie. The first EH of India, written by Ramachandra Guha and Madhav
Gadgil, began by taking inspiration from Marc Bloch and his ‘great study of agriculture
– itself a model of ecological analysis’ (Gadgil and Guha 1992: 7). Historical geography
has a long tradition and is very active today in many countries such as Canada, the UK,
Brazil, and China (Powell and Wilson 2015). The dialogue between history, archaeology,
and ecological history gave birth to many works in Italy around the School of Genova,
which unfortunately have not been translated into English (Moreno 1990). Rural
history, dealing with the land and the landscape (many references exist in Spanish and
Portuguese from Uertaga 1987 to Pádua 2002 and Cabral 2014), produced an impressive
number of studies in nearly every country in the world, while many seminal texts written
by anthropologists and sociologists about societies and their environment have so far
only been published in Danish, Norwegian, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, and so on.
The debate between the core of history as a discipline and EH did not occur in the 1970s
nor in the 1980s, because the original perspective brought by environmental historians
was not very visible at a time when different questions animated the agenda of the social
sciences. Now is the time to open the floor for debates about nature, materiality, and
environmental and climate dynamics. The issue is no longer about the different subfields
of history but about the concept of history itself, since, by reinterpreting temporal
processes and discontinuities, non-historians are unsettling history as a specific mode
of knowledge. More fundamentally, the current question of nature is also the question
of the nature of history. Environmental historians should take the initiative to reread the
evolution of the discipline of history in the light of the question of nature, by investigating
the way in which relations between natural history and human history have been
formulated in different contexts and in relation to other disciplines. The debate about
organicism in sociology at the end of the nineteenth century was about the dangers of
conflating organisms with societies (Mucchielli 1998: 269–76). Prominent scholars such
as Gabriel Tarde and newcomers such as the Durkheimians pointed out the risk that
the use of metaphors posed in confusing the two orders. Human beings are different
from the elements that compose an organism; they can belong to multiple social groups
simultaneously, groups which have no defined dates of birth and death, and which
neither feed nor breed (Tarde 1895, 1896). Analogy is not a scientific method and a firm
social science can only consider the identities between two facts and two relations of
comparison (Simiand 1897: 498). In the second half of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm
Dilthey pushed for a science of the mind (Geisteswissenschaft) separate from that of the
natural sciences. This position was representative of German historicism but was based
on epistemological arguments rather than metaphysical ones. According to Dilthey,
reality is not divided into two different ontological domains. However, subjective and
objective points of view must be separated in order to implement knowledge (Mesure

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1988: 7–12). Even during older periods, the question of nature and history formed part
of a debate among scholars. When Jean Bodin (1530–96) differentiated between divine
history, human history, and natural history, he included the distinction in a meditation
on the decline of political eschatology and the capacity of European states to maintain
peace (Koselleck 2004: 15–6).
How can EH contribute to the Anthropocene forum? Certainly not in elaborating a
sophisticated concept of something beyond human societies, at a time when the divide
between nature and culture is being unsettled by disciplines better equipped than history
for this purpose, but rather in going back to the fundamentals, the understanding of
societies through time. The processual definition of EH was central at the beginning
of the field, before the thematic and interactionist approach became consensual. To
introduce his monograph about Island County, Richard White (1980: 6) wrote: ‘it is
the history of changes wrought in the natural environment by both Indian and white
occupation and use of the land, and the consequences of these changes for the people who
made them’. The major contribution of EH is that it has enriched the understanding of
historical change in connecting environmental changes with social and cultural changes.
Three different types of articulation shape the historical thresholds of the appropriation
of nature.
Social processes are limited by ‘field forces’, a concept coined by Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie. The complete version of his doctoral dissertation – The Peasants of Languedoc
– begun with this mysterious title, which unfolded in three different chapters: ‘Climate
Suggestions’, ‘Plants and Technics from the South’, and ‘Migrations and Temptations from
the North’ (Le Roy Ladurie 1966).14 Le Roy Ladurie did not elaborate on this programme
but opened up a history, inextricably biological and human, that was fed by exchanges
and flows, and that included material constraints without reducing environment to
a static geographical framework. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau (1988:
70–2, 106) highlighted this original approach, especially the chapter about the ‘vegetal
civilisation’, drawing a parallel with what Michel Foucault wrote about sexuality, bodies,
and diseases. These historical approaches considered materiality at once as a given
and as a construction crossing the border between nature and culture. The concept of
field forces proposes to historicize the physical constraints that frame social changes.
Limits are both a given and a social construction, because they are inseparable from the
technical and economic system used to exploit resources, and from representations that
shaped the categories to describe nature and fostered environmental awareness. From
Scotland’s case study, Fredrik Jonsson studied how the dream of richness and nature
without limit – that is cornucopia – emerged at the crossroads of political economy and
financial mathematics, of debates about imperialism and conservation of local societies.
When coal proposed an alternative to organic economy at the end of the eighteenth
century, mineral cornucopia did not end the fear of nature being exhausted until the
1850s (Jonsson 2013, 2014).
The modes of exchange and circulation between human beings and non-human
beings opens up a new field for research, since societies are no longer created exclusively
by human beings. This hypothesis of hybrid collectives, originally proposed by Latour

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(2004: 238) and Descola (2013a: 247–80), but with a different meaning, had not been
given in-depth consideration by historians.15 In counterpoint to the anthropocentric
vision of resources in neo-classic economy that refused to include the agency of nature
in the production of wealth, the Italian historian Piero Bevilacqua (1996) proposed to
consider the agency and productivity of nature, rehabilitated as a full partner of human
history. This agency can be caught and measured through the flux of material and energy
that is metabolism. The process of history is conjointly made by the creative force of nature
and the transformative force of human beings (Armiero and Barca 2004). Far from the
planetary framework of geology that subsumes societies, processuality is then analysed
from the diversity of places and territories where it is at work. This approach is based on
the manipulation of different scales, from micro to macro (Trivellato 2011). The different
types of exchanges are situated along the large set of different ways of appropriating the
Earth, from symmetrical, non-naturalist ontologies to predation as forced and unequal
exchange. My work about the EH of Versailles was an attempt to analyse this territory
from a narrowly defined point of departure as a confrontation between three different
ecologies, each interrogating the relations between human beings and nature in a different
way, whether organized by technique, by mode of living, or by heritage (Quenet 2015).
When the technical networks of water extended all around the castle without internal
limits, the practices of living beings inside the hunting park proposed a new government
of nature that was impossible to assume in the political context of the Old Regime. This
organic and metabolic Versailles, full of fluxes and energy, disappeared when the king
and the court left. The mineral figure of cultural heritage was born out of the death of
the palace as an inhabited place. Extended to include global and imperial scales, this
perspective would allow one to follow the variations of the gradients of ecological forces.
The differential game of temporalities constitutes the third analytical tool. From a
linguistic point of view, the asymmetry of exchanges between human beings and non-
human beings is difficult to completely erase, as human beings speak in the place of non-
human beings. Anthropological hypotheses are only beginning to explore alternative
paths to this anthropocentric road (Kohn 2013). Nevertheless, the process of social and
environmental dynamics establishes a common time by writing history through the lens
of different temporalities. Even the most asymmetric form of predation and exploitation
provokes feedback from nature in society. Environmental issues and the destruction of
the material basis of human communities demonstrate the ways in which human history
is full of non-linguistic signs. The decline of fish is a classic example. The near extinction
of salmon in California in the 1970s is one chapter in the history of the global pressure
exercised upon ecosystems, a result of the discrepancy between the temporal regime
of oceans and that of the exploitation of marine resources. Whereas the population of
fish saw tipping points (the sudden collapse of catch when biomass was overexploited),
the political schedule of environmental issues followed different temporalities. In 1976,
the Federal Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the result of increasing green
social movements (McEvoy 1986), arrived too late to have a positive effect on the salmon
population. The landscape becomes more and more complex if, rather than focusing
only on fish catch, the full networks of hybrid collectives are opened up. Unstable

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environmental dynamics, such as that of ENSO and floods, the temporal technologies of
the market, the impact of the Gold Rush on rivers, the exploitation of woods for settlers
and cities, and the rise of agriculture, breeding, and mills are all part of the story (Taylor
1999). A critical sociology of time based on manipulating temporal scales would help
historians escape from Scylla and Charybdis, from the reductionism of the global and
from the trap of the local.16
The environmental and climate question probes the limits of the professional
organization of historians in world academia. Specialization in different subfields is
inevitable, due to the necessary scientific interactions around specific objectives and the
sheer fact that the immense number of publications makes it impossible for an individual
to read everything, even in their own subfield. But some debates are transversal and
call for a common forum; the distinction between human and natural history is one of
these. Calls for interdisciplinarity are not able to tackle the theoretical foundations of
disciplines, as they work at the borders of scientific knowledge, and not at the core. A
firm definition of EH must be embedded in historical writing and epistemology.

Comment

Sverker Sörlin
It is rare in the recurring discussions of the point and purpose of EH to read an essay
with so much sophisticated erudition, subtle verve, theoretical awareness, and generous,
yet critical reflexivity as Grégory Quenet’s contribution to this volume. I will side with
many of Quenet’s ambitions while distancing myself from some of his reformative
impulses, including his request for a defining theoretical core of the discipline. If
Quenet’s scepticism of the ability of the field to assert itself theoretically is undisputable
it is truly surprising that EH has become so attractive to so many historians, and scholars
from neighbouring fields including the natural sciences. My sense is that both claims
can be true at the same time. Yes, Quenet is right that there are certain fundamental
dimensions of EH that weren’t well thought through as the field emerged and grew.17 Yes,
there must be some reason why EH has worked out despite these shortcomings. I will
try and use this comment to demonstrate why these seemingly contradictory positions
can both be valid.
Quenet is probably right in assuming that with the growth and increasing centrality
of the field, and its many vibrant contact zones with neighbouring subfields, such as
agricultural history, forest history, water history, climate history, economic history, history
of science, and history of technology, the curiosity and interest in what environmental
historians are up to have intensified. With this follows some responsibility and perhaps
a duty to be able to articulate a raison d’être more clearly than when the enterprise had a
more colloquial nature restricted largely to the United States.
Quenet, being French and with a broad training, has his own rendering of the
trajectory of EH, an ‘idiosyncratic understanding’ in his own words. He is in fact not

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much interested in the multiple dimensions of growth within EH. His concern is climate
change appearing and Anthropocene debates raging, features that he thinks will turn
the table of disciplinary development profoundly. This may or may not be the case; it
remains hard to know how deeply the posthumanities and geo-humanities streaks will
affect history, a discipline in which there tends to always be an element of caution towards
prediction, what Reinhart Koselleck once called the Postulat der Prognosenkontrolle
(cited in Müller 2014: 80). For the sake of the argument, I will assume that Quenet’s
critique has a point and that practitioners of EH in the past were too limited. Quenet
reads our predecessors as by and large a group of well-meaning and conventional fellow
travellers pleading loyalty to humanist virtues, keeping agency among the humans and
steering away from any questioning of the dualist orthodoxy. History ‘was built … on the
bedrocks of the divide between the history of humans and the history of nature’. All that
EH talk of distributed agency, of nature as an actor in history was never really serious.
But the ‘conceptual vagueness’ could be forgiven; it was after all compensated for by
magnificent empirical works that also Quenet admires.
EH, unfortunately, has positioned itself in the old, sturdy, Western, neutralist middle-
ground and is mute and numb in the face of both climate change and the posthumanities.
This is the main point of Quenet’s critique and from it also derives his recommendation
for EH research in the future. It needs to depart from its mainstream of human–nature
relations and address the most central point, that of dualistic separation of humans
and nature. In that regard the challenges from the posthumanities, the post-dualist
anthropology (Philippe Descola, Eduardo Kohn), climate change, and Anthropocene
thinking are more than stress factors, they provide the entry to the kind of agenda
that will transform EH from a subfield of endless tolerance and diversity to one of
theoretical rigour.
Most scholars in EH would probably agree with Quenet in some of his critique. Even
after the several post-millennium internal critiques18 it is true that EH remains a broad
church, a polyphonic conversation. The level of theoretical presence and sophistication
has gone up considerably, partly by the new coverage of more theoretically oriented
European, Australian, and Latin American scholars. Most would think this is good, but if
it isn’t yet on the level of other post-1970 subfields such as gender history or science and
technology studies it is also true that many environmental historians aren’t extremely
worried about that. Should they be?
Quenet’s critique presupposes an understanding of historical sub-disciplines as ring
fenced areas of deep inquiry that may, at this point in time, not be the most interesting
alternative. His ideal is a group of scholars assembled around a set of ideas (theory) and
a set of analytical problems (agenda). The archetypical ideal of this kind of approach is
the list of twenty-three most important unsolved problems in mathematics that Hilbert
presented in the beginning of the twentieth century, of which some are still unsolved
(Hilbert 1902). History doesn’t work that way. If a certain set of issues seems absolutely
essential in the 1950s (social history, for example) another seems just as essential in the
1960s (Cliometrics) and yet another one in the 1970s (microhistory or history from
below). These meta-themes are not replaced by new ones because the problems were

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‘solved’. History doesn’t often ‘solve’ problems and, needless to say, EH is more like
history than it is like mathematics which is why environmental historians have moved
from national parks and conservation in the 1970s to urban EH, pollution, and green
imperialism in the 1980s, to social constructions of nature in the 1990s, to situated,
place-based studies à la Haraway and Latour in the 2000s.
The themes were temporarily exhausted (and probably their scholars as well) even
if their specific questions were not fully answered. Some themes also ran across several
decades (natural resources, environmental politics). Anthropocene and posthumanities
are just the most recent of these meta-themes, flourishing in the 2010s, likely to be
superseded, or supplemented during the 2020s or 2030s by some new meta-theme,
it may come from the digital world, from medicine, from extractive industries; it will
almost certainly not be anything we can foresee.
That is the most serious concern I have with Quenet’s quest for theoretical rigour: that
it would require so much energy if it was to become core business of EH that there wouldn’t
be enough space and resources for more mundane work. I don’t think the risk is very
high though. Because, just like history, EH will probably allow for both to happen. EH is
in reality an archipelago of islands, even atolls, where specialized work is done by groups,
networks, or even larger multinational clusters. There are climate historians, forming a
special group. There is work on the boundary between technology and environment,
in an ad hoc organization called Envirotech. There are forest historians, adding to the
diversity, with their own journals and societies. This list could go on. But most aren’t
even organized, they do their work anyway, in agriculture, gender, environmental visual
culture, disaster history, and so on. Any EH conference programme can attest to this
complex hybridity, and the days of theoretical frugality or indifference are, happily, part
of the past.
Quenet has, however, identified a trade-off that should be much more discussed.
Is there a point when the church is becoming too broad? Is groundbreaking work
sacrificed because of the innate, unruly pluralism of EH? Hard to say in any precise way,
but I am inclined to say no. To begin with, it was not better when the field was small
and geographically most active in the United States. That was certainly no guarantee
of theoretical rigour nor was there any particular concentration on big issues, on
the contrary (with individual exceptions of course). Theoretical work has come with
more scholars entering the field, exposing it to influences from other fields of history
(labour history, migration history, educational history, diplomatic history, history of
visual culture, climate history) and even more often from entirely different disciplines
including the social sciences and the natural sciences (the surge of historical work on
the Anthropocene is a case in point). The volume and diversity of the community is
a way of balancing the risk of inertia. The back side of growth, on the other hand, is
fragmentation and lack of coherence.
Quenet’s suggestions seem to me to serve as perfect assembly points for those
who wish to take on long-term big issues. Writing a species history, as suggested by
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009), is such an undertaking.19 It seems extremely valid for
environmental historians, probably with significant support from, for example,

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biologists, archaeologists, historical ecologists, anthropologists including those physical

anthropologists working on genetic analysis of the human phylogenetic tree.20 Colonizing
the Anthropocene seems like another equally inspiring EH mega-project. As Quenet
observes, environmental historians have been very active in these debates, with J. R.
McNeill serving on the Anthropocene Working Group of the Stratigraphic Committee.
On a more general level EH has developed a growing interest in geophysical issues and
the fate of ‘the planetary’ as an extension of the human–nature relationship, and inspired
by the same strand of earth systems science that has produced the Anthropocene
(Crutzen 2002; Höhler 2015; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). This has also meant that new
hybrid relationships have been opened up with the history of science and studies of the
history of the geosciences.
Some of this work may indeed lead some EH scholars to come up with new ways of
understanding the human–nature divide and to question the divide. It is an exciting
thought and an attractive prospect, if successful it would be truly groundbreaking. But
already now we could say that we have learned enough in our hybridizing collaborations
with the sciences that we can claim with some confidence that R.G. Collingwood’s (1994
[1946]) definition of history as the result of human intentionality is questioned. If nature
has agency, as EH has claimed for a long time now that it has (albeit mostly indirectly
as the effects of previous human intervention), then the separation of acts (human) and
events (nature) cannot be upheld. The posthumanities would add even more critical
mass to the ontological issue of the place of the human.
I even find it plausible that Quenet might have identified some of the issues for
EH work in the next decade or two. If so, it would, just as meta-themes of the past
half century, ultimately reflect societal change, widely taken. We are likely to enter an
era of profound post-fossil fuel transformations. Some of the changes are likely to be
comprehensive enough to justify the period from say 1950 to 2050 to be called a new
Sattelzeit (‘saddle period’), on a par with the arrival of modernity in the period 1750 to
1850 (Koselleck 1988). Concepts such as the Environment, Anthropocene, the Great
Acceleration, climate, posthuman, and many others have already changed their meaning
considerably as compared to classical Enlightenment modernity before 1950, or didn’t
even exist then (Steffen et al. 2015; Warde, Robin, and Sörlin 2018). They belong in the
vocabulary of such change and to theorize it and rethink history and historiography
using these concepts seems in fact almost inevitable. Interestingly, they all revolve
around the man–nature relationship and drawing them into the analysis will become a
significant contribution to the core issue that Quenet has identified.
We may recall that Koselleck (1997: 18) himself thought of the Enlightenment as a
period when history could finally be separated from nature. What Quenet argues is that,
after two centuries in separation from nature it is the mission of the presently emerging
Sattelzeit to re-join the two. This would surely be an undertaking major enough to attract
many more than environmental historians, but EH should appropriately feel a duty to be
part of its very core. If this work is done radically and thoroughly enough it may measure
up to the challenge that Quenet also raises for ‘the concept of history itself ’ and about the
‘nature of history’. This is a grand idea and one that is very timely. He suggests a wealth

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of literature that is already renegotiating the place of nature in history, to which he could
have added work on ‘toxic bodies’ by Stacy Alaimo (2010) and Nancy Langston (2010).
He outlines what is essentially the contours of a revolution in historiography on a
par with shifts happening previously with the introduction of secular temporalities by
Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century and early work on periodization by Giambattista
Vico, taking place in Koselleck’s Sattelzeit. Quenet makes a very important point when
he argues that this could also provide a way of differentiating planetary history which
has in its current incarnation become overly dominated by geological scales, partly as
a result of the Anthropocene debates on periodization which in turn have sparked a
historiographical discussion about the relative contributions of past and present societies
to stratigraphy and given new life to old ghosts of environmental determinism.21 It
remains the task of historians to make sure that the scales on which human societies act
are part of an ‘integrated history’, a concept so far mostly applied in science-led attempts
to connect natural and human histories.22
Quenet rightly emphasizes the need to understand temporalities as a much more
complex phenomenon than periodizations. Again, new work is appearing in a number
of disciplines, from philosophy to religious studies to anthropology which suggests the
emergence of an age of multi-temporalities that may also be part of the new Sattelzeit. It
is for example possible to see the work of the earth system sciences and climatology as an
act of what Helge Jordheim (2014) has called ‘work of synchronisation’, which is also an
instance of the ‘scaling’ that is necessary to translate natural processes to times and places
where they intersect with the human enterprise. How do genes and micro-organisms
‘from below’ or geophysical teleconnections ‘from above’ become integrated parts of the
kind of complex narratives of change, and the attempts to explain change, that we call
‘the writing of history’? It is truly inspiring to think of EH in this visionary light.
My small caveat in the prospect of such an exciting and even revolutionary
progression of historiography would be not to recommend this to be elevated to the
(only) ‘rigorous definition of environmental history’. Why should we? I would see it as
a welcome, perhaps even expected enlargement of intellectual energies drawn to new
core topics. I wouldn’t even be extremely nervous about whether the bulk of this work is
undertaken by environmental historians or by anthropologists or sociologists or critical
geographers or, indeed, other kinds of historians, although I would be surprised if EH
presence isn’t very high. But even in such exciting times there will be scholars who wish
to study extinctions, pollution, and Arctic sea ice or tropical disease and the prairies of
the American West. They would be using methods and theory that may not always be
groundbreaking, and I would think that is all right, regardless of its relationship to the
rigorous definition.
Quenet’s argument that the siren’s call for interdisciplinarity doesn’t relieve EH from
being precise of its own core mission is valid, but only because it is obvious. If he means
that a disciplinary identity can’t include interdisciplinary ambitions I disagree. The future
discipline of history that he so enticingly lays out for us is, by his own example, perfectly
interdisciplinary, borrowing gracefully from wherever something useful is to be found.
It is inclusive, integrative, receptive, interactive, it absorbs information from much wider

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sources than before, including data provided by the natural sciences. The differentia
specifica of the historiographical enterprise we should be discussing are rather to do with
the capacity to manage radical pluralism of sources and methodologies, of ingenuity
in interpretation. Here, I think, is where we need to keep our minds cool. The basic
virtues of the profession still prevail. We are already experts in multilayered analysis and
we are already dealing with ‘supercomplexity’ (Barnett 2000). We will expand in many
directions and we will go to places where we never went before, but we will not cease to
be who we are.
Inspired by creative propositions and visionary calls, just like Quenet’s own, there
will possibly be many who will join this enterprise. Some have already started the
interdisciplinary work under the banner of ‘environmental humanities’, where EH looms
large (Sörlin 2012; Emmett and Nye 2017). It is hard to see this taking shape under
a master plan. I can’t perceive EH as an enterprise where some board decides what is
core business and streamlines the organization to address the most major challenges.
Nor would I recommend anything like that in any subfield of history, or in the whole
discipline called history. We can entice and promote, foster and stimulate, recognize and
award in order to make sure that the right conditions occur for things we find important,
including major theoretical issues. This may, for example, imply the mainstreaming of EH
and nature-culture thinking into broader, traditional history programmes on all levels.

Response

Grégory Quenet
Sverker Sörlin has developed an elaborate argument about the two dimensions of EH,
a soft theory and a diversity of practices that he opposes to my idealistic call for theory.
This vision, based on a deep and long knowledge of the field, is however not exempt from
an idealized description of the daily life of environmental historians, especially young
ones. Sörlin reminded us in his generous and acute manner that history is a conversation
between scholars; nevertheless, this conversation is becoming more and more fragmented
and difficult owing to the increasing demands on our time, the reorganization of
universities on business models, and the growing number of researchers. We should have
more collective discussions about the professional conditions and its evolution among
different countries. Besides, climate change puts increasing pressure on environmental
historians, since the dialogue about past natures is no longer confined to this community
but is now open to all the urgent winds of environmental challenges.
In reality, our discussion of problems and solutions is more important than deciding
which organizational model is the best for EH. Needless to say, we share the same
enthusiasm for thematic diversity, a broad church, and experimentation, and the same
scepticism about any rigid model imposed by any board. Our divergence is mainly about
how differently we interpret the seminal metaphor used by Sörlin himself: ‘environmental
history is in reality an archipelago of islands, even atolls’. This sentence evokes for Sörlin

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a set of different communities of environmental historians, happy to gather around some

themes and objects, whereas only a few adventurous travellers are able to work at the
theoretical margins of the sub-discipline.
Why not go further? EH is now mature enough to bring the question of nature back to
the centre of history. When the debate is about history itself, all environmental historians
and historians are affected. The point is not about discipline and border police but is
fundamental: Why is knowledge of change over time so essential when we are confronted
with environmental issues? The answer is anything but obvious and the question
subsumes that of analysing past environments or that of time as a social structure.
Climate change has set in movement the relations between past, present, and future
that were blocked in the last few decades by the end of ideological promises about the
future and the inflation of memory and commemoration. But, time is now disoriented
and its heuristic value contested. For some scholars, the distinction between past and
future has no more sense because of the loops of climate (Latour 2017). For other scholars,
a hiatus able to break the continuity of time is a serious hypothesis (Chakrabarty 2009).
It’s where islands and atolls can help us: more than a trope, it’s a filigree twisted and
plaited into the design of EH and even history.
If EH as a dedicated field began in the United States, it was partly due to the New
World being a laboratory of environmental degradations, and of national identities
shaped by this intensive human action on nature, both practically and culturally (Nash
1967). Richard Grove (1995) established later that the historical matrix of this approach
was situated in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean islands under the impact of European
expansion since the end of the fifteenth century. This spatio-temporal model of human
beings into the Garden of Eden influenced the most famous EH monographs. As a
consequence, EH is full of encounter narratives, which diverged from the Braudelian
spatio-temporal model based on sedimentation and the coexistence of different times.
This narrative model of encounters perpetuated the acheiropoïetic temptation of EH
without the intervention of humans, despite all the conceptual and empirical critiques
of that idea. In fact, the deconstruction of the concepts of wilderness and nature didn’t
cancel the idea of something that human beings didn’t create (Cronon 1995). There is
always a garden and a beginning somewhere. Climate change amplified this schema at
a planetary level when the Anthropocene debate focused on the opening date of this
new geological period. It brought back into history the ‘idol of chronology’ mocked by
François Simiand (1960 [1903]) more than a century ago.
The narrative model of the archipelago of islands had both positive and negative
consequences. On the one hand, I agree with Sörlin that, thanks to it, the field included
a set of brilliant case studies exploring the relations between human beings and their
environment on a dedicated territory. On the other hand, the model contributed to the
fragmentation of EH and its difficulties in offering general perspectives, such as national
history revisited or global studies that would recognize the complexity of societies.
Islands and atolls once again, but ‘no island is an island’.23 The metaphor also offers a
way to escape from the trap of fragmentation, and to define the theoretical core of the
discipline, provided that the centre of gravity of the model is moved from space to time.

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Two different options exist for this reconnection. The first is to make visible the
temporal model that informs sources and archives about place-based studies and to
reconnect it with the history of history. Environmental historians didn’t refer that much
to the work of the famous anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, and more precisely missed
his great book Islands of History (1985).24 Certainly, Sahlins didn’t consider the natural
environment of Hawaii, Tahiti of Fiji, but he established that there is no experience
of islands and encounters without culture being altered in action, system and event,
structure and history. The core of EH should be to propose a new paradigm for historical
changes, from processes that are not only human-made but result from exchanges
between all beings and even between human beings and inanimate forms.
The second option is to re-examine how the concept of history was inhabited by
tensions since the conquest of the New World. Some minority voices were conscious of
its disastrous impact, on non-European societies, including their environment. Jean de
Léry and Michel de Montaigne were at the origins of the ecological pessimism of Claude
Lévi-Strauss; Denis Diderot wrote strong pages in the Histoire des deux Indes by Raynal
and gave a voice to the old Tahitian in the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville; in Cuba
and Latin America, Alexander von Humboldt associated the natural history of humans
and the human history of nature. Certainly, all centuries didn’t manifest the same degree
of anxiety, and the eighteenth century was more conscious of its own fragility than the
nineteenth century (see Lilti 2011).
Having said that, I agree with Sörlin’s argument about seemingly contradictory
positions that can be both valid about what EH is and should be. On one side, the field is
diverse, vibrant, open to everybody interested in environmental issues. On another side,
all these voices should be part of the general and theoretical debate on history and the
social sciences, where very different options exist, far from any irenic vision of science.
How can environmental historians contribute to this debate? Sörlin is sceptical because
he refers to the endless and exhausting debate about the social construction of nature.
The theoretical turn I suggested, however, is not related to cosmologies beyond the idea
of nature but based on the concept of history, considered as the weak point of the climate
change debate.
The ontological critique of the Western idea of nature was very fruitful for opening
new conceptual perspectives, and as an alternative to an exhaustive appropriation of
the Earth. Nevertheless, this approach was less relevant to assessing the historical and
geographical diversity among naturalism, and the complexity of environmental and
social changes. It offers only a few alternatives for Westerners other than the utopia of
becoming Amerindian or erasing modernity. Moreover, the call for new cosmologies
contrasts with the global expansion of dualism, especially today when the new leaders of
the South – China, India, Brazil, and tomorrow some African countries – are more and
more fuelling the Anthropocene. If it’s partly too late – and that’s certainly unfortunate –
to have a common world between human and non-human beings, is it possible to have
a common time? The duty of EH should be to elaborate history both as a theoretical and
practical tool able to analyse and discriminate between the diversity of entanglements
between human and non-human beings through time. This programme is not limited to

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a subfield of history, but aims to re-materialize history itself and pluralize natural history
at the risk of the dissolution of EH into history.

Notes

1. The birth of environmental history is usually identified with a special issue of the
Pacific Historical Review published in 1972 (Nash 1972). The term is, in fact, a bit older
(Nash 1970).
2. In 1990, for the first time, a leading historical review devoted a special issue to
environmental history (Journal of American History, 76, 4). In 1995, Alfred Crosby
described environmental history as a ‘sect’ with scholars who ‘write for and talk to each
other exclusively’ (Crosby 1995: 1188). The 1990s also marked the beginning of the dialogue
between US environmental history and Indian subaltern studies dedicated to environmental
issues (Guha 1989; Sutter 2009).
3. In this volume, Ewa Domanska (Chapter 12) examines these questions from outside of
environmental history: post-anthropocentric humanities call for posthumanist history that is
a shift from classic environmental history.
4. Many references would be necessary to make this point. I refer here, as in other parts of this
chapter, to the results of my intellectual history of environmental history, that contains the
basic bibliography (Quenet 2014).
5. The mapping of new territories of environmental history is at the core of the classical paper
by John McNeill (2003).
6. Alice Ingold (2011) elaborated this point, arguing that environmental history seems to
ignore a large part of the tradition of the social sciences.
7. It is only recently that environmental history started to look back to its origins and its own
history without avoiding the corporate history of its precursors. In 2008 the ‘ASEH Founders –
Oral histories’ (http://www.aseh.net/about-aseh/history-of-aseh) began, along with a series
of interviews published by Environmental History. These projects focused on the US side of
environmental history.
8. In the US Journal of Environmental History, thirty-eight papers referred to Bruno Latour up
until the first issue of 2017, twenty-nine of which appeared since 2005, but none referred to
Descola’s individual work. The English translation of Descola’s magnum opus will certainly
increase the use of his ideas by environmental historians (Descola 2013a).
9. The definition of environment as a second nature, or as nature as modified by human beings
by distinction with nature per se, is not relevant from Descola’s and Latour’s perspective.
Artificialization does not account for the philosophical problem of object and subject
(Latour 2015: 92–3).
10. So many works should be quoted to illustrate this point, that I will only quote one firm and
synthetic analysis by Castonguay (2006).
11. ‘The environment is taken for what is not universal but at a particular point in history’
(Opie 1983: 15). The cultural turn of environmental history started with the controversy
about wilderness (Cronon 1995).
12. This scepticism is largely shared by the participants of the workshop organized by the
University of South Carolina and the Rachel Carson Center (Emmett and Lekan 2016: 66–7,
89–90, 92–4, 107, 111).

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13. Exposition ‘Reset Modernity!’, curated by Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard-Terrin, Christophe
Leclercq, and Donato Ricci, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe,
17 April–21 August 2016.
14. This first part was nearly forgotten when the popular paperback version fell out of
circulation (Le Roy Ladurie 1969) along with the English translation (Le Roy Ladurie 1974).
Anglophone readers had access to the climate chapter – thanks to Le Roy Ladurie 1971 – but
in a context isolated from its initial framework.
15. For Latour, a collective is a procedure for collecting humans and non-humans, whereas for
Descola it is an existing social form to be studied by anthropologists.
16. In that sense, this hypothesis is different from the total history of local places developed by
William Cronon, confronted both by the difficulties of rising in generality and of limiting an
analysis which is, by definition, without any limit (Cronon 1992b).
17. In an essay co-authored with Paul Warde I made a similar claim about a decade ago, see
Sörlin and Warde (2007).
18. Of these Quenet mentions Steinberg (2002), Stroud (2003), Sörlin, and Warde (2007), but
one could just as well add others, for example Asdal (2003) (discussing mostly Haraway and
Latour).
19. Among many counter voices to species history we find Emmett and Lekan (2016) and
Cooper (2014).
20. Like the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, where such work has been conducted and changed
the way we perceive human evolution and diffusion over hundreds of thousands of years.
21. The Anthropocene Review has carried a range of articles on these themes, for example,
Lowenthal (2015) and Paglia (2015). See also Pálsson et al. (2013); Swanson (2016); and
Pálsson and Swanson (2016).
22. The role of natural scientists for the debates on temporalities is underarticulated by Quenet,
and several contributions in recent years have argued that there is an ‘integrated history’
possible that link nature and humans and with capacity to make predictions, see Cornell et
al. (2010) and Costanza et al. (2012).
23. The sentence ‘no island is an island’ refers to Carlo Ginzburg (2000) revisiting English
(literary) history.
24. I found no reference to Islands of History neither in the journal Environmental History nor in
Environment and History, despite the violent dispute with Gananath Obeyesekere that made
this book famous.

References

Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington, IN:
University of Indiana Press.
Anker, P. (2001), Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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