Editing the first Journal of World History: global history from inside the kitchen

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Gabriela Goldin Marcovich ◽  
Rahul Markovits

AbstractThis article offers the first study of the Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, the Journal of World History published under the auspices of UNESCO from 1953 to 1972 as a by-product of the ‘History of mankind’ project. Drawing on material in the UNESCO archives, it delves into what Lucien Febvre, the first editor of the Cahiers, called his ‘kitchen’, in order to understand world history as a practice. Data on author origin and article subject matter point to the journal’s mitigated success in overcoming Eurocentrism. The article ultimately contends that the Cahiers was at once a laboratory that experimented with new forms of relational history, and a forum where the very nature of world history was discussed by scholars from around the world (mainly from the West, but also from the East and the South). It suggests that today’s epistemological discussion on global history might benefit from the reflection offered by this now largely forgotten experiment.

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Vries

Global history seems to be the history for our times. Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zi

Abstract The School of History and the Institute for Global History of Beijing Foreign Studies University was founded in December 2017. It aims to become a significant platform in China for international scholars to conduct research on global history. The school offers course on the histories of China and regions across the world from a global perspective. In terms of research, it is the school’s goal to understand history through interactions, especially the interaction between China and the world in modern terms. The school pays special attention to the fields of the history of ideas, the knowledge transfer and scholarly exchange, and the cultural and linguistic contact between the East and the West.


1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Washbrook

AbstractThe concept of Modernity is presently very problematic in the social sciences. Included in those problems is a tendency to hypostasise ‘the West’ as possessed of an originary and authentic culture and history, which distinguished it absolutely from all Other and Traditional cultures and histories. These distinctive qualities laid a unique pathway to Modernity, which subsequently became ‘universally’ available to the rest of the world. This paper explores historical conditions in Britain and India at one of the key moments of Modernity's ‘emergence’: the mechanisation of cotton textile manufacturing. It argues that Britain's modernisation is inconceivable except in a broader global context of which India already comprised a vital part. And, reciprocally, that India's role in the construction of Britain's Modernity, so far from opening up possibilities of it following the same course itself, conveyed imperatives which took its society towards a reverse process of ‘Traditionalisation.’


Slovo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fengfeng Zhang

The Bukharan Crisis: AConnected History of 18th-Century Central Asia deconstructsthe context of Bukharan crisis in the eighteenth century referring to theorieson the global history and the connected history other than a myriad of previousassumptions which attribute the fall of the Bukhara Khanate to the isolationand decline of the early modern Central Asia. But through the lens of Scott C. Levi,Central Asia was neither isolated nor in decline, so he further addresses theBukharan crisis from several different perspectives. On the whole, this book comprisesfour chapters and it elaborates the real historical situation and the challengeBukhara faced in Central Asia’s early modern history around some thematicdiscussions on the image of Silk Road and the history of the Bukhara Khanate.Levi argues that Central Asia actually became more deeply integrated into theoutside world in multiple ways, and it’s far from isolated from the world history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Barry Pateman

Review of Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, Wobblies of the World. A new edited collection on the global history of the Industrial Workers of the World.  


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter examines evidence principally from the US that the Great Influenza provoked profiteering by landlords, undertakers, vendors of fruit, pharmacists, and doctors, but shows that such complaints were rare and confined mostly to large cities on the East Coast. It then investigates anti-social advice and repressive decrees on the part of municipalities, backed by advice from the US Surgeon General and prominent physicians attacking ‘spitters, coughers, and sneezers’, which included state and municipal ordinances against kissing and even ‘big talkers’. It then surveys legislation on compulsory and recommended mask wearing. Yet this chapter finds no protest or collective violence against the diseased victims or any other ‘others’ suspected of disseminating the virus. Despite physicians’ and lawmakers’ encouragement of anti-social behaviour, mass volunteerism and abnegation instead unfolded to an extent never before witnessed in the world history of disease.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Olstein

Abstract World history can be arranged into three major regional divergences: the 'Greatest Divergence' starting at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago) and isolating the Old and the New Worlds from one another till 1500; the 'Great Divergence' bifurcating the paths of Europe and Afro-Asia since 1500; and the 'American Divergence' which divided the fortunes of New World societies from 1500 onwards. Accordingly, all world regions have confronted two divergences: one disassociating the fates of the Old and New Worlds, and the other within either the Old or the New World. Latin America is in the uneasy position that in both divergences it ended up on the 'losing side.' As a result, a contentious historiography of Latin America evolved from the very moment that it was incorporated into the wider world. Three basic attitudes toward the place of Latin America in global history have since emerged and developed: admiration for the major impact that the emergence on Latin America on the world scene imprinted on global history; hostility and disdain over Latin America since it entered the world scene; direct rejection of and head on confrontation in reaction the former. This paper examines each of these three attitudes in five periods: the 'long sixteenth century' (1492-1650); the 'age of crisis' (1650-1780); 'the long nineteenth century' (1780-1914); 'the short twentieth century' (1914-1991); and 'contemporary globalization' (1991 onwards).


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Forbes Manz

Temür has been many things to many people. He was nomad and city-builder, Turk and promoter of Persian culture, restorer of the Mongol order and warrior for the spread of Islam. One thing he was to all: a conqueror of unequalled scope, able to subdue both the vast areas of nomad power to the north and the centres of agrarian Islamic culture to the south. The history of his successors was one of increasing political fragmentation and economic stress. Yet they too won fame, as patrons over a period of brilliant cultural achievement in Persian and Turkic. Temür's career raises a number of questions. Why did he find it necessary to pile conquest upon conquest, each more ambitious than the last? Having conceived dreams of dominion, where did he get the power and money to fulfill them? When he died, what legacy did Temür leave to his successors and to the world which they tried to control? Finally, what was this world of Turk and Persian, and where did Temür and the Timurids belong within it?


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