Category: New Avenues in Global History
This TRAFO Blog series originated from the seminar “New Avenues in Global History” held by Sebastian Conrad in the summer term of 2024 at the Freie Universität Berlin. In the seminar some of the latest trends in global history have been discussed by the students, taking only books and publications into consideration that were published in the 2020s. The topics of the contributions to the series have been chosen by the students and offer a variety of themes that are connected by some shared overarching guiding questions: How has global history changed? What challenges does it face today? And where is the field headed?
The series covers a diverse spectrum of themes, such as the history of disabilities, the history of capitalism, intellectual history, and more. By taking the latest, cutting-edge scholarship in the field as a starting point, the present contributions can be understood as applied case studies by a new generation of global historians.
A common guiding framework allowed the contributors to critically engage with emerging trends in the discipline and explore its future directions. Each text underwent reviews by their peers.
If you are interested in contributing to this series, please contact Alex Favalli (communication@trafo-berlin.de).
By Michel Wong. Clara Mattei might not have set out to write a Global History of austerity politics, but as a student of Global History, I find her framework of austerity as measured by the wage share very useful and would like to apply it in my own history writing. I just have one problem with it. Mattei’s framework is a framework for analysing capitalist societies, but history – even just modern history – has many examples of societies that cannot really be called capitalist. What I want to know is: can Mattei’s framework also be applied to non-capitalist societies? In the sections that follow, I shall try to test the limits of Mattei’s framework by seeing if it can be applied to one of modern history’s more important non-capitalist societies – the Soviet Union.
By Julie Birke. Clara Mattei’s book “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism” offers an important contribution to our understanding of austerity policies and the debate on the origins of neoliberalism by putting class challenges at the heart of her argumentation and linking it to monetary and financial policies of the 1920s. By comparatively analysing the economic policies of interwar liberal Britain and fascist Italy, the book shows how austerity worked as a set of fiscal, monetary and industrial mechanisms, with the common goal for economists in those countries to reimpose capitalist relations of production where they were gravely endangered. This essay will demonstrate how Mattei revives and updates the class interpretation of neoliberalism and to what extent it makes a compelling contribution to the field of global history.
By Johan Bolding Rasmussen. In this article, Rasmussen examines how Critical Theory can engage with global intellectual history. He suggests that by moving beyond Eurocentric perspectives, Critical Theory can address global challenges more effectively. Rasmussen proposes integrating diverse intellectual traditions to enrich critical discourse and enhance its relevance in a global context. According to him, “global intellectual history is the emergence of a promising and strong research field that combines intellectual history with the recent increase in attentiveness towards the global”. Similarly, “recent years have seen a significant number of research monographs” on the Frankfurt School emerge. Inherently universal, the literature does, however, raise crucial questions on its globality.
By Zoe Wineck and Hunadah Al Hariri. The authors start by introducing the field of Global History, explaining its shortcomings regarding epistemic invisibility, and the real-world impact of the field. In the following, they look at how war caused disabilities as a form of colonial subjugation. More specifically, they look at the case of Israel-Palestine and argue that the state of Israel, since its establishment in 1948, has consistently used the maiming of Palestinians as a colonial tool. The history of this practice has been marginalized in historiography but is essential to understanding the conflict today.
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. 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. What’s next?