New Avenues in Global History
By Sebastian Conrad
In this moment of rapid political and cultural change, a reassessment of what global history stands for, what it can contribute and where its limits lie is a timely exercise. Global history as a subfield has had a fast and successful career. Virtually unknown at the turn of the century, it has by now acquired an almost ubiquitous presence in the discipline. A first set of pioneering interventions and survey works – by C.A. Bayly, Jürgen Osterhammel, Kenneth Pomeranz, Rebecca Karl, and others – was soon followed by a series of books, written from different perspectives and historiographical traditions, that reflected on the potential of the new approach.[1]
This first phase, the era of the field’s establishment was followed by a series of critical assessments. In the wake of the financial crisis, and then the worldwide populist turn of the 2010s, the globalizing trends of the previous decades gave way to anti-globalizing movements and talk of a “backlash” and a “decoupling” of the world. As a result, the global history approach, which was widely seen as somehow corresponding to the process of globalization, came under particular scrutiny. While some of the first alarmist responses to such geopolitical shifts now read like premature obituaries,[2] recent years have seen a critical engagement with the new approach that in its early days was not immune to triumphalism (Robert Moore went so far as to predict “the collapse of every alternative paradigm“)[3] and celebratory accounts of entanglements, flows, networks, and mobility.[4]

This debate is still ongoing. More recently, the focus has shifted, as the central concern is less whether the global turn is productive or limiting, but rather what kind of global history has the most potential. To some extent, this is a methodological question. The relationship between micro- and macro-perspectives is one such arena. As global history has long since abandoned the older obsession with planetary coverage, micro-historians have found it generative to link their interest in the concrete and specific to broader contexts and frameworks.[5] More generally speaking, and beyond the question of scale, historians have seen the need to put extra effort into the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the field. As Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel argue, “Global history and other relational approaches to history may be said to need conceptual and theoretical awareness even more urgently than other fields of history.” After all, they add, “global histories are a theoretical enterprise by definition.”[6]
Beyond the changing political conditions and the re-emerging questions of theory, global historians are also exploring new topics and objects of study. The traditional strongholds of the field – migration, empire and colonialism, the world economy, environmental history, etc. – remain on the agenda, but are now complemented by other, sometimes more experimental fields, such as intellectual history in a global framework, the history of gender and sexualities, the study of disabilities, and others.
And finally, one can also observe a generational shift – usually one of the conditions for disciplinary renewal of not paradigmatic change. Based on the experience of the MA program “Global History,” a joint-degree program at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin inaugurated in 2012, it is easy to see how productive a conversation across generations can be. The students in the program have early on decided to take matters into their own hands, and have launched “Global Histories,” a student-run journal that publishes fresh research articles, conference reports, and book reviews by global history students from around the world. Between 2015 and 2024, a total of 17 issues have been published, showcasing the vibrant debates of the next generation of global historians.[7]
In a similar spirit, the seminar “New Avenues in Global History” (summer term, 2024) gave students the opportunity to engage with, reflect on, and respond to some of the most recent publications in the field. The selection of titles was made by the participants, and the syllabus reflected their interests and concerns. The reviews published on this blog – a selection of the titles read in the seminar – have emerged from the discussions in the seminar. Written by students, they were discussed and reviewed by a student-organized editorial committee before being posted. Some of them take the form of a standard book review; others use new publications to map and assess emerging areas of research. They are intended to stimulate discussion, and to invite others to add similar contributions to the blog.
Sebastian Conrad, January 2025, Berlin
Footnotes
[1] Jérome David, Thomas David and Barbara Lüthi (eds.), Globalgeschichte/Histoire Global/Global History, Zurich (Chronos) 2007; Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert and Ulrike Freitag (eds.), Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, Frankfurt (Campus) 2007; Pamely Kyle Crossley, What is Global History? London (Polity Press) 2008; Eric Vanhaute, Wereldgeschiedenis: Eeen inleiding, Ghent (Academia Press) 2008; Philippe Beaujard, Laurent Berger and Philippe Norel (eds.), Histoire globale, mondialisations et capitalisme, Paris (La Découverte) 2009; Cho Ji-hyŏng and Kim Yong-Woo (eds.), Chigusa ŭi tojŏn: ŏddŏgge yurŏpchungsimjuŭi rŭl nŏmŏsŏl kŏtinga, Seoul (Sŏhaemunjip) 2010; Mizushima Tsukasa, Gurôbaru hisutorî nyûmon, Tokyo (Yamakawa Shuppan) 2010; Haneda Masashi, Atarashii sekaishi e: Chikyū shimin no tame no kōsō, Tokyo (Iwanami Shinsho) 2011; Laura Di Fiore and Marco Meriggi, World history. Le nuove rotte della storia, Rome (Laterza) 2011; Douglas Northrop (ed.), A Companion to World History, Oxford (Wiley-Blackwell) 2012; Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, New York (Norton) 2014; Diego Olstein, Thinking History Globally, New York (Palgrave Macmillan) 2014; Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? Princeton (Princeton University Press) 2016.
[2] Jeremy Adelman, “Is Global History Still Possible, or Has It Had its Moment?,” Aeon March 2017.
[3] Robert Moore, “A Global Middle Ages?,” in James Belich et al. (eds.), The Prospect of Global History, Oxford (Oxford University Press), 2016), 85.
[4] David A. Bell, “This is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network,” The New Republic, October 25, 2013; Maxine Berg (ed.), Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2013; Stefanie Gänger, “Circulation: Reflections on Circularity, Entity, and Liquidity in the Language of Global History,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 3 (2017), 303-318; Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13 (2018), 1–21.
[5] John-Paul A. Ghobrial (ed), Global History and Microhistory, Past & Present 242, Issue Supplement 4 (2019); Amy Stanley, “Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600-1900,” The American Historical Review 121 (2016), 437-460; Martin Dusinberre, Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2023.
[6] Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel, „Introduction: Rethinking History, Globally,“ in: Gänger and Osterhammel (eds.), Rethinking Global History, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2024, 6.
[7] https://www.globalhistories.com/index.php/GHSJ.
About the Author
Sebastian Conrad is a historian and Japanologist. Since 2010, he has been Professor of Modern History and has been leading the research section “Global History” at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 1999 to 2005, he was a member of the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften und was Professor of Modern History at the European University Institute in Florence. In 1999/2000 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is the author of “Die Königin: Nofretetes globale Karriere” (Propyläen, 2024), “What is Global History?” (Princeton University Press, 2016), and “German Colonialism: A Short History” (Cambridge University Press, 2012)”. Sebastian Conrad has been member of the Forum’s Board from 2009, when the Forum Transregionale Studien was founded, until 2022.
Citation: Sebastian Conrad, New Avenues in Global History, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 14.01.2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/132y8
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