Panel discussion: ways forward and major challenges

John Darwin has assessed the contributions offered by archives of imperial history in analysing connections, interpretations, and control of empires over their conquered territories. Megan Vaughan has discussed the marginal place of Africa in current global history writing. Peer Vries has challenged the recent focus of global historians on connections, networks, exchanges and transfers. This history leaves out wars, violence, conflicts, and especially the state. Sufumi So and Billy Kee-Long So have sought more use of transnational biographies and narratives of individuals across time and place in Asia as well as Europe. Did some of these perceive themselves within wider world and global identities?

Notes on some discontents in the historical narrative

The colonized Spanish American world has not yet played a part as a leading subject of global history. French historiography addresses a concept of ‘asymmetries’ on European writing on encounters and cultural transfers. European historians risk essentialist frameworks in their comparisons of societies. Analysis must address the longer and broader framework of conquered and colonized peoples.

The art of global comparisons

This chapter considers comparison made hitherto between Western and Chinese art. Mieke Bal has argued that comparison becomes a ground for relative judgement; it establishes hierarchies and distracts from looking. The chapter considers attitudes to Chinese art before and after the Second World War. Chinese art was part of the syllabus before and after that war, and was excluded thereafter. It was relegated to the marginal place of the exotic arts. Mieke Bal has argued that comparison should not be an instrument of judgement, but a source of differentiation.

Technology and innovation in global history and in the history of the global

The Chinese of the Ming/Qing dynasties took a distinctive approach to technology and innovation. The Chinese assigned a place and function to technologies and their products in statecraft, public life, and scholarly achievements. Ming connoisseurs valued craftsmanship, and porcelain and silk were used to negotiate political control and economic interests. But free markets emerged for these products of craftsmanship. This chapter charts how products were marketed, and how original designs and techniques were claimed and marked by their craftsmen.

Institutions for writing the economic history of the global

Global history needs to take advantage of new research methodologies of teamwork and collaboration. Historians and economic historians can work together to provide historical data sets covering the world. New evidence gathering and analysis through teams of historians pooling expertise can create new public goods for global history. Examples are provided by current collaborative projects on national income, prices, real wages, and labour relations. Historians working in such teams must make agreements over who owns the data, the division of labour and who leads the projects and publications.

Reflections on doing global history

What difference has global history made to non-national historical agendas such as regional studies and studies based on ecological zones? The methods of regional history have many parallels with global history. Both transcend questions of boundaries and engage in methods of connection and comparison. Conceiving a polycentric early modern world challenges us to cross mental boundaries.

Problems in global history

The long periodization of global history puts notions of the modern under scrutiny. Global history challenges us to convert our understanding of Europe from a ‘knowing subject’ into much more of an object of that history. If the global history of the ‘British’ Industrial Revolution takes us to China, on the one side, and the Americas, on the other, by what rights does it deserve, any longer, to be described as ‘British’? How successful has global history been, thus far, at finding or erecting signposts to a new, and significantly different historical understanding of the past?

Global history: approaches and new directions

This chapter investigates timing and reasons for the ‘turn’ to global issues in historical writing. These have included dissatisfaction with the older frameworks of national histories and area studies, and a new interest in comparative and connected histories. The chapter critically addresses the focus of much recent debate on comparisons of East and West, and the question of the ‘Great Divergence’. It raises new questions of transmissions of material cultures and technologies, and of human agency and the histories of families and individuals, in global context. There are serious methodological questions for historians, those of sources, interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborations.

The European miracle in global history: an East Asian perspective

The ‘European miracle’ needs to be compared to an East Asian development path. In East Asia efficient institutions fostered great use of labour, an ‘industrious revolution’ path entailing extensive use of family labour and systems of double cropping. The result was a ‘labour-intensive industrialization’ such as occurred in Meiji Japan. That labour-intensive path now shapes the centres of most of the world's manufacturing employment, currently situated in East, South-east and South Asia. The challenge for Japan and other East Asian economies has been to develop resource- and energy-saving technologies.

Comparison in global history

The methods of comparative history pose an analytic focus for global history. Comparison must analyse not just one or two, but multiple paths of economic and historical development in the early modern world. Comparison must reach beyond the stereotypes of a dynamic Europe and stagnant Asia to show the strikingly different needs and imperatives leading towards different paths of economic and technological change.