Developments since the 1990s
Since the late 1980s or 1990s there has been a sharp increase in scholarship seeking to explore cross-regional connections, flows and entanglements. As a consequence of recent developments, transnational and world historical scholarship is no longer regarded as a marginal exception to a nationcentered disciplinary reality.
Quite to the contrary, bordercrossing studies are frequently seen as important centers of innovation. The underlying change in scholarly predilections took place as a diffuse process within most branches of historiography, ranging from cultural history to political his- tory,61 and no area of research figured as a clear epicenter. To put it in a different way, transnational and world historical research has flourished in many different branches of historiography, ranging from economic history to cultural history and from environmental history to labor history.In contrast to the main body of world historical scholarship during the Cold War and before, much of the more recent literature emerges from primary source-based projects. Up until the 1980s, large-scale historical accounts, textbooks and trade books constituted the core of the field. Certainly, great works narrating the history of the world or the global history of entire centuries continue being written but in contrast to the Cold War period and before, these works can now draw on a rich body of research literature that explores single topics and themes from global and
transnational perspectives.[75] As a general trend, the narrative frameworks of such macroscopic works have become more complex, and an increasing number of authors now pay more attention to topics like non-Western forms of global agency.
In many regards, this development has come to challenge some of the disciplinary cultures and structures that had long supported the mental maps of historiography.
An increasing number of scholars are now pursuing topics that had long been rather neglected due to the institutional set-ups of history departments. For example, more and more historians have grown interested in the historical relations between South Asia and East Asia, or between Latin American and African regions. For a long time, not much attention had been paid to connections of this kind. Certainly, fields like East Asian history or South Asian history had not been completely ignoring past interactions between their region and the rest of the world. But scholars chiefly concentrated on entanglements with the West, thereby marginalizing the multifarious historical interactions between East Asia, South Asia and other regions. For instance, modern historiography paid only comparatively scant attention to the partly dense interactions between societies such as China and India. One of the main reasons underlying this problematic pattern is that hardly any historian of East Asia (including scholars who were based in countries like China, Japan or Korea) had received significant training about an additional world region outside of the West. This situation has not changed dramatically but a growing number of historians now feel willing and able to bridge the gaps created by area-specific expertise.The question has been raised whether this new research movement can still be called “world history” or whether other field designations need to be found.[76] After all, “world history” long primarily stood for grand perspectives that were often structured around Eurocentric master narratives. For this reason, quite a number of scholars prefer the term “global history” as a marker for the new research trends unfolding since the end of the Cold War. Also other concepts such as “transnational history” or “entangled histories” have appeared on the scene. However, the expression “world history” has also changed its connotations and now points to a rather vibrant and diverse community of approaches that have departed widely from the earlier contours of the field.
Hence it is small wonder that many researchers have come to use terms such as “global history” and “world history” as interchangeable with one another. In essence, this means that a categorical distinction between them is no longer possible. A more special case is big history, which investigates structures, patterns and changes from the Big Bang up until the present day, thereby linking historical inquiry with themes studied primarily by the natural sciences.[77]It is very important to note that neologisms like “transnational history” or “global history” have found their ways into many languages, ranging from Spanish to Japanese. In fact, the growth of new forms of bordercrossing scholarship can be observed among historians in many societies around the world.[78] It would certainly be misleading to assume that the new interest in historical connections and translocal themes originated in the West, and that from there it spread to the rest. The patterns and rhythms of this rather young academic trend are in fact far more complex than any model based on the idea of Western diffusionism could possibly grasp.[79] Certainly, the growing significance of global and world history has been related to events in global time, particularly the end of the Cold War divides and the emerging facets of globalization. Yet in every place it has also been impacted by transformations in local time, that is, political, societal, institutional and other transformations that impacted historiographical cultures as well.
Despite all intensifying academic exchanges, world historical scholarship has not become identical all over the world. Local, regional or national elements still continue to season the field because they have an effect on the narratives, methodologies and debates among scholars. For example, academic funding structures, the patterns of academic systems, opinion climates, intellectual traditions and modes of historical memory all have an influence on the field of world history.
In that sense, current world historical research and teaching looks different in societies such as Japan, India, France or Canada. This is not to say that each of these academic communities operates primarily within isolated national communities; also one should not assume that there are monolithic national or cultural traditions of world historical scholarship. The local specificities of current world historical research are much more subtle, and they are enmeshed with an increasingly pluralistic and transnationally entangled landscape of bordercrossing historical studies.In some contexts, important social changes and political transformations could decisively influence the cultures of academic histories in general and world history in particular. For example, in the United States the social revolutions, which brought an unprecedented ethnic diversity to university faculty and student bodies, had a strong impact on the ways in which the later waves of historiography would unfold.[80] Partly influenced by the aftershocks of the civil rights movement, academic history witnessed particularly strong challenges to concepts such as “Western civilization” and “progress” during the 1970s and 1980s. A growing number of scholars started seeing these and other terms as too loaded with power interests to be useful as analytical tools for the historian's workshop.
This concern about hegemonic discourses, which stemmed from America's internal “history wars,” also had a bearing on the rather large community of scholars (due to Cold War funding for the area studies) specializing in world regions outside of the West. For example, many prominent historians came to problematize the Eurocentric categories with which different world regions such as China, India or the Middle Eastwere being assessed and analyzed.[81] This opinion climate, which gave philosophical movements such as postmodernism or postcolonialism a comparatively strong stance in US historiography, also left some marks on the more recent literature in transnational and world history.
For instance, the vast majority of scholars in these fields are now reluctant to use concepts such as “modernity” as methodological devices or descriptive terms.In China, concepts of this kind play a much stronger role, even though there is also a debate about the problem of Eurocentric categories and concepts. Here the institutional contexts for the recent rise of bordercrossing research were rather different from those in the United States. After all, for many decades world history has already had a strong presence in most Chinese history departments as well as in the overall education system. Nevertheless, an increasing number of historians started actively searching for alternatives to well-established historiographical cultures and structures. Most notably, a wealth of transnational studies is now seeking to overcome the institutional divides between Chinese history and world history, which have existed for decades.[82] In a related step, there have been sustained efforts to move away from Europe-centered narratives - for instance by reflecting upon the possibility of specifically Chinese perspectives of world history. Nevertheless, compared to their US-American counterparts the majority of Chinese world and global historians are much more hesitant to deconstruct concepts such as “modernization” when describing more recent processes of change; neither is there a strong wave challenging the idea of the nation as a core container of the past. Academic works trying to find new ways of thinking about the world while at the same time leaving the idea of a national past rather intact are certainly endorsed by the Chinese state. Yet recent generational experiences also make numerous Chinese scholars more prone to regard global and national perspectives not as contradictory with one another. It would certainly be very problematic to suppose that Chinese scholarship is just “lagging behind” and will naturally gravitate toward the Western mainstream.
There are strong reasons to assume that such local differences in world historical scholarship are there to stay. Despite this rather obvious fact, they have not been sufficiently debated among world and global historians yet. Even further than that, theoretical debates within the field have not sufficiently focused on changing the global landscapes of academic life in general historiography in particular. However, doing so would be a decisive step in the direction of establishing the bases for more balanced scholarly exchanges between world historians from different parts of the globe.[83] Many of the divisions and power gaps, which characterized the global academic system since its inception during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, remain intact today. Needless to say, this hierarchical international pattern certainly is an obstacle to developing the field of world history into further, promising directions.
Given this situation, it should now be a primary task of this generation of global historians to put different scholarly traditions into more sustained dialogues with one another. This is particularly the case with scholarly communities from countries whose academic systems have, up until the present day, been rather detached from one another. Especially during the past few decades, it was particularly Anglo-American universities that played the role of global academic transaction hubs. A more pluralistic landscape of such hubs and, by implication, more decentered networks of collaboration around the world still remain largely a project for the future, even though important steps heading in this direction have already been taken. Yet if scholarship fails to create new sociologies of knowledge in the age of the internet and comparatively cheap long-distance travel, it will also fall short of its potentials for academic innovation.
Increasing levels of communication among historians from various world regions can produce more than mere cross-fertilizations between different research approaches. They can trigger wider debates on key concepts, epistemological assumptions and world-views that necessarily frame any attempt at thinking about history on a global scale. Exchanges reaching to the very depths of our current historiographical cultures can bring some of the excitement back to a discipline whose intellectual fervor has somewhat suffered from the logics of academic over-professionalization. The field may even come to play important, albeit still ill-defined new public roles, particularly in dialogues with global institutions and other civil society agents.
Certainly, world historians cannot and should not be the manufacturers of new historical identities, be they global or regional. Unlike historians during the age of nation formation, world historians will not have a political might behind them rolling out historical ideas through education systems. But this lack of political structures throwing their full weight of support behind the study of world history is also a huge opportunity since it will grant more space to visions of the past that run counter to the logics of political establishments and economic power-holders. The precondition for such interventions, however, is that transnational dialogues and collaboration among world historians and like-minded scholars are being further intensified.
Certainly, as already mentioned in the introduction, academic historiography cannot hope to function as the figurehead of new forms of global concern and transnational consciousness. After all, historical visions are being disseminated to countless people through a wide spectrum of forums. Particularly the mass media, ranging from newspapers to movies and from internet clips to cartoons, have a strong effect on popular understandings of national as well as world historical events.[84] For instance, they influence the main categories and concepts with which a large number of people think about world history, and they popularize ideas of which regions played a central role in the global past. The same is the case with religious institutions that often disseminate their own historical interpretations to their own followers.
Despite its limited impacts, university-based historical scholarship has a strong influence on general education systems as well as, to a certain extent, on the media. Yet in the future, world history and global history can only hope to affect these spheres if they further actualize the enormous potentials of historiography as a global professional field. The very fact that there are trained historians based in almost all countries of the world has not been translated into a significant worldwide community of letters because the current academic system is still widely based on the same national divisions and international hierarchies as before. Changing those can mean a decisive step ahead in the trajectories of world historical thinking, writing - and the deeper concerns that should be driving both.