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| Aeon Essays
What is global history now?
Historians cheered globalism with work about
cosmopolitans and border-crossing, but the power
of place never went away
by Jeremy Adelman
Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea professor of history and director of the
Global History Lab at Princeton University. His latest books are Worldly Philosopher:
The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman (2013) and the co-authored Worlds Together,
Worlds Apart (4th ed, 2014). He lives in New Jersey.
Edited by Sam Haselby
W ell, that was a short ride. Not long ago, one of the world’s leading historians,
Lynn Hunt, stated with confidence in Writing History in the Global Era (2014) that
a more global approach to the past would do for our age what national history did
in the heyday of nation-building: it would, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had said was
necessary of the nation-builders, remake people from the inside out. Global
history would produce tolerant and cosmopolitan global citizens. It rendered the
past a mirror on our future border-crossing selves – not unlike Barack Obama,
the son of a Kenyan father and white American mother, raised in Indonesia and
educated in the Ivy League, who became the passing figure of our fading dreams
of meritocracy without walls.
The mild-mannered German historian Jürgen Osterhammel might serve as an
example of that global turn. When his book The Transformation of the World: A
Global History of the 19th Century (2014) came out in English, one reviewer
baptised him the new Fernand Braudel. It was already a sensation in Germany.
One day, Osterhammel’s office phone at the University of Konstanz rang. On the
other end of the line was the country’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. ‘You don’t
check your SMSs,’ she scolded lightly. At the time, Merkel was on the mend from
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a broken pelvis and the political fallout of the Eurocrisis. While recovering, she’d
read Osterhammel’s 1,200-page book for therapy. She was calling to invite the
author to her 60th-birthday party to lecture her guests about time and global
perspectives. Obsessed with the rise of China and the consequences of
digitalisation, she had turned to the sage of the moment: the global historian.
It’s hard to imagine Osterhammel getting invited to the party now. In our fevered
present of Nation-X First, of resurgent ethno-nationalism, what’s the point of
recovering global pasts? Merkel, daughter of the East, might be the improbable
last voice of Atlantic Charter internationalism. Two years after her 60th birthday,
the vision of an integrated future and spreading tolerance is beating a hasty
retreat.
What is to become of this approach to the past, one that a short time ago
promised to re-image a vintage discipline? What would global narratives look like
in the age of an anti-global backlash? Does the rise of ‘America First’, ‘China
First’, ‘India First’ and ‘Russia First’ mean that the dreams and work of globe-
narrating historians were just a bender, a neo-liberal joyride?
U ntil very recently, the practice of modern history centred on, and was
dominated by, the nation state. Most history was the history of the nation. If you
wander through the history and biography aisles of either brick-and-mortar or
virtual bookstores, the characters and heroes of patriotism dominate. In the
United States, authors such as Walter Isaacson, David McCullough and Doris
Kearns Goodwin have helped to give millions of readers their understanding of
the past and the present. Inevitably, they wrote page-turning profiles of heroic
nation-builders. Every nation cherishes its national history, and every country has
a cadre of flame-keepers.
Then, along came globalisation and the shake-up of old, bordered imaginations.
Historians quickly responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crumbling
protective ramparts of national capitalism, the boom in container shipping, and
the rise of the cosmopolis. New scales and new concepts came to life. Europe’s
Schengen Agreement, inked in 1985, the North American Free Trade Agreement
in 1993, and the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995, heralded
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new levels of international fusion. These now-imperilled treaties promised a
borderless world. ‘The world is being flattened,’ Thomas Friedman’s popular
manifesto of globalisation, The World Is Flat (2005), concluded. ‘I didn’t start it
and you can’t stop it,’ Friedman wrote in an open letter to his daughter, ‘except at
great cost to human development and your own future.’
As the only game in town, globalisation produced a new popular genre that might
be called patriotic globalism. Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and
the Age of Genocide (2002), Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That
Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), and books by Adam
Hochschild all gave us horrible crises with would-be heroes fashioned, not as
nation-builders, but as humanitarian worldmakers. There was also a surge of
stories about a shared, planetary future, with a common, carbon-addicted past.
The Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 turned sustainability into a border-
busting buzzword and fuelled environmental history. Two decades earlier, Alfred
Crosby could not find a publisher who wanted his book The Columbian Exchange
(1972), which charted the ecological fallout of the integration of the New World
biome into the Eurasian system. Now, his book is Biblical.
In 2006, the scholars jumped officially on board. A team founded the Journal of
Global History. Patrick O’Brien at the London School of Economics kicked it off
with a call for new cosmopolitan meta-narratives for ‘our globalising world’. It was
dedicated to stories to transcend (quoting the 18th-century Tory philosopher
Lord Bolingbroke) ‘national partialities and prejudices’. Behind the scenes,
universities in Europe (which includes, for a few more months at least, the United
Kingdom), pockets in Japan, China and Brazil, but most especially in the US,
rolled out new courses, new research centres, and new PhD programmes.
After years of falling enrolments, declining majors and a dispiriting job market for
history PhDs, many saw ‘global history’ as an elixir, a way to return to public
relevance. Globalisation had become all the rage. Historians, Hunt wrote in 2014,
were stepping up with narratives of interconnection and integration. Jared
Diamond’s works, synthesising 13,000 years of global history, populated airport
newsstands. To get middle- and high-school students jazzed up about history on a
cosmological scale – ‘13.8 Billion Years of History. Free. Online. Awesome’ – Bill
Gates unveiled his Big History Project. More recently, Sven Beckert’s Empire of
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Cotton: A Global History (2014) swept prizes and hit No 1 on Amazon’s bestseller
ranks under the ‘Fashion and Textile’ category.
T o understand what global history was, it helps to understand what it was
supposed to eclipse. It used to be that, in the US, history departments had their
cores in American and/or European fields; in Canada, Australia and Britain, the
nuclei were also national. History meant the history of the nation, its peoples and
their origins. When social and cultural history came along, it changed the subject
from presidents or prime ministers to Hollywood or garment workers. But the
framework remained mostly national; historians still wrote books about the
making of the English working class, or the conversion of peasants into French
citizens. There might be a smattering of East Asian or Latin American historians
in the mix. Often, they were cordoned into regional studies units, or lumped – as
in my home department at Princeton – as ‘non-Western historians’, defined by
their fundamental difference, there to embellish but not challenge the national
canon. The major exception was the study of migrations and diasporas, coerced
or free. But even those fields tended to sit alongside the national behemoths;
there was the American history survey (or French, or British), and then the story
of African-Americans.
True, there has long been something called ‘world history’. The standard world
history course was a tour of the civilisations that preceded or abutted ‘Western
Civilisation’. The Western Civ industry dated to the early years of the 20th
century. Back then, faced with creeping specialisation, historians got summoned
to offer a structured base for the national collegian-citizen. With household names
such as Arnold Toynbee and Will and Ariel Durant it boomed, like the rest of
American industry, in the golden age of NATO, Sputnik and federal spending.
One of its greatest figures was the University of Chicago historian William H
McNeill, author of the stand-by History of Western Civilisation: A Handbook (1949).
As Western Civ became something of a relic in the 1960s, ‘world history’ or ‘world
civilisations’ took its place to explain the Triumph of the West and, by extension,
the Decline of the Rest. McNeill’s epic The Rise of the West (1963) was the high-
standard bearer for this kind of encompassing view of the planetary past
composed of civilisational blocs competing for global supremacy. This was not
global history, though many subsequent global historians cut their teeth studying
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other civilisations. Rather, it was a story that brought in the Rest to help explain
the West.
By the 1980s, it was no longer foregone that the Rest was synonymous with
decline, or the West with rise. The Rest, to some, became the new threat to define
the purpose of the West. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations and the
Remaking of World Order (1996) offered a counterpoint to the emerging bravura
of one-world heroism. In Huntington’s view, the essentially dark, antagonistic,
competitive perspective of the world-civilisations approach remained the driving
force of history. Don’t kid yourself, he argued: the fall of the Berlin Wall merely
heralded the return of an older, deeper civilisational conflict. That message has
new treads with the White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s prophecies
about the inevitable collision of the ‘Judeo-Christian West’ with the Jihadist East.
‘There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global,’ he told an audience in
2014. ‘Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and
really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.’
The notion of intractable divides, however, seemed increasingly at odds with the
high-def, global-fusing present; it mobilised a new generation of historians to go
beyond stories of our walled-off, essential selves. Their global history project
would reveal connections across societies instead of cohesions within them. The
vintage comparative, civilisational framework gave way to contacts and linkages.
Connection was in; networks were hot. Global history would show the latticework
of exchanges and encounters – from the Silk Road of 1300 to turbo-charged
supply chains of 2000.
More than anyone, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, now at the University of California,
Los Angeles, made the coinage of ‘connected histories’ his own. As determined to
dethrone the myth of Indian civilisation (whose Hindutva ideology is dear to the
tribalism of India’s Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party) as he is to dispel the idea
of a Great European Trajectory (from Athens to the Enlightenment, a march dear
to European tribalists), the son of urbane Delhi turned encounters and contacts
with many origin points and as many meanings into a global bricolage that
antedated our multicultural makeups. Through travel, discovery, translation and
the flow of books, silver and opium – ‘histories that moved’ as Subrahmanyam
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called them in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2013 – he evoked
a world laced together long before the rise of the West.
Global history’s other signature was its emphasis on dependence between
societies. If globalisation opened the borders between Westerners and Resterners,
global historians were especially interested not just in the contacts, but in the
ways in which countries and regions contoured each other. The rise of the West
looked more and more not just like a response to the Rest, but dependent on it.
Even the industrial revolution and Europe’s great leap forward in the 19th
century, the one thing that seemed to separate Europe from others, came under
the global historian’s macroscope. In The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the
Making of the Modern World Economy (2000), Kenneth Pomeranz demolished the
view of Europeans as the authors of their own miraculous rise. He revealed how
much European enterprise and accumulation shared with China. How Europe’s
break from the common, Eurasian-Malthusian straightjacket began not with the
region’s internal uniqueness, but with access to and conquest of what Adam
Smith called the wastelands of the Americas. In the same vein, global historians
demonstrated how much insurance, banking and shipping startups owed to the
African slave trade. The European miracle was, in short, a global harvest.
Global history did not mean telling the story of everything in the world. What was
global was not the object of study, but the emphasis on connections, scale and,
most of all, integration. Even the nations and civilisations were more the products
and less the producers of global interactions. Some scholars went all-out. ‘If you
are not doing an explicitly transnational, international or global project, you now
have to explain why you are not,’ said the Harvard historian David Armitage in
2012. ‘The hegemony of national historiography,’ he pronounced, ‘is over.’
N o sooner did historians catch the globalisation wave with fancy new courses,
magazines, textbooks and attention, than the wave seemed to collapse. The story
changed. A powerful political movement arose against ‘globalism’. White-
supremacists and Vladimir Putin fans from the Traditionalist Worker Party in the
US proclaim as their slogan that ‘Globalism is the poison, nationalism is the
antidote.’ Donald Trump put it only a bit more mildly. ‘Americanism, not
globalism, will be our credo,’ he thundered to cheering Republicans in his
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convention speech in July 2016. On the day after the US inaugurated Trump, the
French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen gave an incendiary speech at a
summit in Germany, calling 2017 the year of the great awakening of the
nationalist Right. ‘We are living through the end of one world,’ she proclaimed,
‘and the birth of another.’
Suddenly, global historians seemed out of step with their times. If the backlash
was a wake-up call for the globalisers, it also revealed some problems for the
global chroniclers.
All narratives are selective, shaped as much by what they exclude as what they
include. Despite the mantras of integration and the inclusion on the planetary
scale, global history came with its own segregation – starting with language.
Historians working across borders merged their mode of communication in ways
that created new walls; in the search for academic cohesion, English became
Globish. Global history would not be possible without the globalisation of the
English language. In a recent workshop in Tokyo, I marvelled as Italians, Chinese
and Japanese historians swapped ideas and sake in a lingua franca. But this kind of
flatness can mask a new linguistic hierarchy. It is one of the paradoxes of global
history that the drive to overcome Eurocentrism contributed to the Anglicising of
intellectual lives around the world. As English became Globish, there was less
incentive to learn foreign languages – the indispensable key to bridging ourselves
and others. According to a 2015 report by the Modern Languages Association,
the US foreign-language head count at universities peaked in 2009, and has been
declining ever since.
The retreat from learning how to talk with others reflected a wider stall. Despite
the embrace of global history, there is evidence that the global turn didn’t actually
help to raise the profile of the Rest. In a 2013 survey of 57 history departments in
the UK, the US and Canada, Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt show that
historians remain pretty loyal to the West after all. In the UK, 13 per cent of
historians study the non-Western world. The most wincing datum? East Asia
commands only 1.9 per cent of all history faculty appointments in the UK. In the
US, the figure is almost 9 per cent. Even in the US, less than one-third of
historians are interested in the world beyond the West. If some critics were
getting all worked up about the encroachment of Resterners on the Western Civ
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canon, they needn’t worry. ‘We’re overwhelmingly interested in ourselves,’
Clossey and Guyatt conclude. To justify Brexit, the UK’s prime minister Theresa
May yearns for a ‘Global Britain’ (as if Europe were not part of the globe), but UK
historians still look inwards; 41 per cent of historians in the UK study Britain and
Ireland, homelands to 1 per cent of the world’s population. Oxford University, my
alma mater, recently mothballed its professorship in Latin American history, the
last of its kind in the UK. Outside the Anglosphere, things are mostly worse. In all
the German-speaking universities, there are only five professors of African history.
In Japan, to study non-Japanese and non-‘Oriental’ pasts means dispatch from
history departments altogether, to teach about the Other in other units on the
margins of the master-discipline.
What are we to make of all this? First, the high hopes for cosmopolitan narratives
about ‘encounters’ between Westerners and Resterners led to some pretty one-
way exchanges about the shape of the global. It is hard not to conclude that
global history is another Anglospheric invention to integrate the Other into a
cosmopolitan narrative on our terms, in our tongues. Sort of like the wider world
economy.
Secondly, to some extent, global history sounds like history fit for the now-
defunct Clinton Global Initiative, a shiny, high-profile endeavour emphasising
borderless, do-good storytelling about our cosmopolitan commonness, global
history to give globalisation a human face. It privileged motion over place, histoires
qui bougent (stories that move) over tales of those who got left behind, narratives
about others for the selves who felt some connection – of shared self-interest or
empathy – between far-flung neighbours of the global cosmopolis.
Perhaps we should not be shocked at the backlash against post-national,
cosmopolitan story-telling. During the French regional elections of 2015, one
Front National poster featured two women’s faces, one painted with the French
tricolour and the other wearing a burqa. The text proclaimed: ‘Choose your
neighborhood: vote for the Front.’ The logic of global history tended to dwell on
integration and concord, rather than disintegration and discord. Global historians
favoured stories about curiosity towards distant neighbours. They – we – tended
to overlook nearby neighbourhoods dissolved by transnational supply chains.
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Global history preferred a scale that reflected its cosmopolitan self-yearnings. It
also implicitly created what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in Strangers in
Their Own Land (2016) called ‘empathy walls’ between globe-trotting liberals and
locally rooted provincials. Going global often meant losing contact with – to
borrow another of her bons mots – ‘deep stories’ of resentment about loss of and
threat to local attachments. The older patriotic narratives had tethered people to a
sense of bounded unity. The new, cosmopolitan, global narratives crossed those
boundaries. But they dissolved the heartlanders’ ties to a sense of place in the
world. In a political climate dominated by railing against Leviathan government,
big banks, mega-treaties with inscrutable acronyms such as TPP, and distant
Eurocrats, the pretentious drive to replace deep stories of near-mourning with
global stories of distant connection was bound to face its limits. In the scramble to
make Others part of our stories, we inadvertently created a new swath of
strangers at home.
G lobal history faces two seemingly opposite challenges for an inter-dependent,
over-heating planet. If we are going to muster meaningful narratives about the
togetherness of strangers near and far, we are going to have to be more global and
get more serious about engaging other languages and other ways of telling
history. Historians and their reader-citizens are also going to have to re-signify the
place of local attachments and meanings. Going deeper into the stories of Others
afar and Strangers at home means dispensing with the idea that global
integration was like an electric circuit, bringing light to the connected. Becoming
inter-dependent is not just messier than drawing a wiring diagram. It means
reckoning with dimensions of networks and circuits that global historians – and
possibly all narratives of cosmopolitan convergence – leave out of the story:
lighting up corners of the earth leaves others in the dark. The story of the
globalists illuminates some at the expense of others, the left behind, the ones who
cannot move, and those who become immobilised because the light no longer
shines on them.
To shift the imagery: understanding inter-dependence means seeing how it
expands personal and social horizons for some, but also thins bonds with others.
At least until those bonds become more meaningful than an Instagram list, there
will be much more resistance to integration than we have admitted.
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To gain better insights into the dynamics and resistances to integration, to give as
much airtime to separation, disintegration and fragility as we do to connection,
integration and convergence, we are going to have to get rid of flat-Earth
narratives and ideas of global predestination once and for all. We are going to
have to account for how more interdependence can yield more conflict, how for
instance, despite growing trade and student exchanges between China and
Japan, Beijing can announce (as it did in 2014) two new national holidays to
commemorate the victims of Japanese aggression from 1937 to 1945.
Connection, mobility, fusion, oneness: we put our stock in the magnetism of the
market and the empathetic power of a cosmopolitan spirit that appeared to take
hold of the upper echelons of a higher education committed to an idyll of global
citizenship.
I did my own part in the global pivot. For several years, I oversaw Princeton’s
internationalisation drive, creating global knowledge supply chains. It never
occurred to me, or to others, to ask: what would happen to those less sexy,
diminutive, scales of civic engagement? We didn’t worry much. They were the
remits of provincialism, quietly escorted from the stage upon which we were
supposed to be educating the new homo globus.
This does not make global history less pressing. On the contrary. One of the
ironies is that the anti-globalism movement is immersed in transnational mutual
adoration networks. The day after the Brexit plebiscite, Trump travelled to the UK
to reopen his golf resort. The British had ‘taken back their country’, he told the
bristle of microphones, then returned home to Make America Great Again. Le
Pen’s excitement about Trump is well-known. Fyodor V Biryukov, head of Rodina,
the Russian Motherland Party, calls this swarm ‘a new global revolution’. It was,
we should recall, the global financial crisis of 2008-9 that did the most to ravage
the hopes of one-world dreamers, emanating from the sector that had gone
furthest to fuse Westerners and Resterners while creating deeper divides at home:
banking.
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In short, we need narratives of global life that reckon with disintegration as well as
integration, the costs and not just the bounty of interdependence. They might not
do well on the chirpy TED-talk circuit, compete with Friedman’s unbridled faith
in borderless technocracy, or appeal much to Davos Man. But if we are going to
come to terms with the deep histories of global transformations, we need to
remind ourselves of one of the historian’s crafts, and listen to the other half of the
globe, the tribalists out there and right here, talking back.
aeon.co 2 March 2017
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