scholarly journals Historia global o las geografías del pasado. Implicaciones de la perspectiva global y geográfica en la escritura de la historia / Global History or the Geographies of the Past: Implications of a Global and Geographical Perspective in the Writing of History

Author(s):  
Jordi Cortadella
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Navarro Jiménez

ResumenLa historia global es un campo de estudios emergente. En la aproximación al pasado desde esta perspectiva, el giro territorial y la escala de la larga duración son elementos centrales, con lo que ello supone de solapamientos metodológicos y epistemológicos con otras disciplinas, sobre todo con la geografía. Esta perspectiva ofrece abundantes beneficios, pero también se deben considerar los riesgos que supone. A través de ejemplos concretos de obras escritas desde este campo, el artículo discute la vigencia de conceptos como globalización y ecúmene, pero también cuestiones metodológicas como la larga duración y el determinismo geográfico. Se pretende con ello identificar posibilidades, fortalezas y riesgos en la escritura de la historia global.Palabras claveHistoria global, geografía, territorio, larga duración, solapamientos metodológicos.AbstractGlobal history is an emergent field of study today. To apprehend the past from a global perspective, territorial turn and longue durée time scale become pivotal concepts, with the corresponding methodologic and epistemological overlaps with other disciplines, especially geography. Many benefits can be obtained from this perspective, but there are also risks that need to be considered. Through specific examples of works written from this field, this article examines the validity of concepts of globalization and ecumene, and discusses methodologic aspects related to the longue durée and geographic determinism. The ultimate purpose of it is to identify possibilities, strengths and risks in the writing of global history.Key WordsGlobal history, geography, territory, longue durée, methodologic overlaps.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 29-76
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Moreno García

Abstract Globalization, the decline of Western hegemony, and the rise of new political and economic actors, particularly in East Asia, are concomitant with the emergence of more encompassing historical perspectives, attentive to the achievements and historical trajectories of other regions of the world. Global history provides thus a new framework to understanding our past that challenges former views based on the cultural needs, values, and expectations of the West. This means that humanities and social sciences are subject to intense scrutiny and pressed to adapt themselves to a changing cultural, academic, and intellectual environment. However, this process is hindered by the gradual loss of their former prestige and by the increasing influence of economics in the reorganization of the educational, research, and cultural agenda according to market-oriented criteria. The result is that the mobilization of the past increasingly conforms to new strategies in which connectivity, trading, and diplomatic interests, as well as integration in dynamic flows of wealth, appear of paramount importance. Egyptology is not alien to these challenges, which will in all probability reshape its very foundations in the foreseeable future.


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick O’Brien

This essay has been written to serve as a prolegomenon for a new journal in Global History. It opens with a brief depiction of the two major approaches to the field (through connexions and comparisons) and moves on to survey first European and then other historiographical traditions in writing ‘centric’ histories up to the times of the Imperial Meridian 1783–1825, when Europe’s geopolitical power over all other parts of the world became hegemonic. Thereafter, and for the past two centuries, all historiographical traditions converged either to celebrate or react to the rise of the ‘West’. The case for the restoration of Global History rests upon its potential to construct negotiable meta-narratives, based upon serious scholarship that will become cosmopolitan in outlook and meet the needs of our globalizing world.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-332
Author(s):  
Ingo Heidbrink

The articles in this Forum are revised versions of papers presented in a roundtable session of the XXII International Congress of Historical Sciences, which was held in Jinan, China, during August 2015. In line with the roundtable format deployed by the congress, a broad proposition was introduced in the opening paper, followed by four responses delivered by experts in the field and a plenary discussion of the issues raised by the speakers. In this session, the proponent, Ingo Heidbrink, discussed the development of maritime history as a historical sub-discipline in relation to the emergence of world (and global) history. Particular attention was afforded to the comparative growth rates of these cognate sub-disciplines, and to the reasons why maritime history has expanded relatively slowly, leading to the emergence of a ‘blue hole’ in our knowledge and understanding of the past. The four respondents then addressed the issues raised by Heidbrink from their own disciplinary and regional perspectives. As Heidbrink’s ‘Concluding Remarks’ indicate, all participants agreed that, in itself, the allocation of a session to this subject on the core programme of the congress was a significant recognition that maritime history is a historical sub-discipline that is of relevance to the wider global community of historians, and not just those who are interested in the interaction of humans and the oceans.


Author(s):  
Joseba Agirreazkuenaga

In order to establish and consolidate the themes and ways of writing history, historians must be attentive to the global and local public agenda. Empowered lives - Resilient nations is a program for human development promoted by the UN. As long as there are local powers and local communities it will be necessary to carry out biographical-local research, analyzing these powers and communities in the past and present, establishing resilience patterns. We transform the historical research of the local past into global history. The personal and the political cannot be dissociated because “The personal is political and the political is personal”. Even eating is a political practice in today’s globalized world.


2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-584
Author(s):  
Avinoam Shalem

The Western academy's growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem, the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”-centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past.


Author(s):  
Frederik Dhondt

This review article treats the booming scholarship on the history of international law over the past decade. Works with a broader view (1), including the recent big-book syntheses and collective works, are contrasted with monographs (2), from studies of treaties and doctrine, over diplomatic practice to scholarship by historians and, finally, interdisciplinary scholarship. This texts provides a personal panorama of the wide array of scholarly perspectives on a common object: rules recognised in the community or society of states. New insights from history and social sciences, especially the turn to global history, open fresh prospects for ‘traditional’ legal historical research. Studying the encounter between ‘European’ international law and other continents rises our indispensable intercultural awareness. Yet, it should also serve to better understand the specificity of European legal thinking or diplomatic practice, and does not render research on the latter obsolete or redundant.



2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 841-861 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE SMITH

AbstractThe review engages with three recently published works, which represent a cross-section of different approaches to studying processes related to the material world. The works consider the emergence of global systems of cotton manufacturing and its relationship to capitalism, the growth of tea consumption in Britain and its social, cultural, and economic impacts, and histories of consumption over a broad chronological and geographical span, respectively. Together, they demonstrate that histories of production, trade, consumption, and use are being rethought in light of the new approaches and questions prompted by global history and new histories of capitalism. At the same time, the review argues, the publication of these works suggests that fundamental assumptions about the material world are changing. Under the influence of new materialism, historians are increasingly tackling questions of agency, materiality, and thingness. As a result, alongside studying what objects mean, historians are increasingly asking what things do. The review argues for the need to ensure that such approaches continue to interact with cultural and social concerns in order to form analyses that fully grapple with the complexity of the material world, as it existed in the past.


BMC Biology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Saskia Pfrengle ◽  
Judith Neukamm ◽  
Meriam Guellil ◽  
Marcel Keller ◽  
Martyna Molak ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Hansen’s disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance in historical records, its origins and past dissemination patterns are still widely unknown. Applying ancient DNA approaches to its major causative agent, Mycobacterium leprae, can significantly improve our understanding of the disease’s complex history. Previous studies have identified a high genetic continuity of the pathogen over the last 1500 years and the existence of at least four M. leprae lineages in some parts of Europe since the Early Medieval period. Results Here, we reconstructed 19 ancient M. leprae genomes to further investigate M. leprae’s genetic variation in Europe, with a dedicated focus on bacterial genomes from previously unstudied regions (Belarus, Iberia, Russia, Scotland), from multiple sites in a single region (Cambridgeshire, England), and from two Iberian leprosaria. Overall, our data confirm the existence of similar phylogeographic patterns across Europe, including high diversity in leprosaria. Further, we identified a new genotype in Belarus. By doubling the number of complete ancient M. leprae genomes, our results improve our knowledge of the past phylogeography of M. leprae and reveal a particularly high M. leprae diversity in European medieval leprosaria. Conclusions Our findings allow us to detect similar patterns of strain diversity across Europe with branch 3 as the most common branch and the leprosaria as centers for high diversity. The higher resolution of our phylogeny tree also refined our understanding of the interspecies transfer between red squirrels and humans pointing to a late antique/early medieval transmission. Furthermore, with our new estimates on the past population diversity of M. leprae, we gained first insights into the disease’s global history in relation to major historic events such as the Roman expansion or the beginning of the regular transatlantic long distance trade. In summary, our findings highlight how studying ancient M. leprae genomes worldwide improves our understanding of leprosy’s global history and can contribute to current models of M. leprae’s worldwide dissemination, including interspecies transmissions.


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