Global history has come under attack. It is charged with neglecting national history and the ‘small spaces’ of the past, with being an elite globalist project made irrelevant by the anti-globalist politics of our age, with focusing exclusively on mobile people and things, and with becoming dangerously hegemonic. This article demonstrates that global history is, intertwined with a focus on the nation and the local, on individuals, outsiders, and subalterns, and on small and isolated places. Moreover, global history has directly addressed immobility and resistances to flow, and remains relatively weak in the discipline, versus the persistent dominance everywhere of national history. The article offers a new short history of the rise of the contemporary idiom of global history, and a prospect for a future in which scholars may find, through collaboration, alternatives to the European weights and measures of the past, and to the dominance of Anglophone historians. It argues that we should no more reverse the ‘global turn’ than we should return history’s gaze only to propertied white men. Rather than a retreat from global history, we need it more than ever to fight against myths of imperial and national pasts, which often underpin nationalist populisms.

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Discussion: The futures of global history

The phenomena called Globalization, is transforming the international relationships and situations among countries into a totally different state of transnational relationships and situations. Ironically, this kind of transnational conditions unfolding on a global scale today, can help us rediscover the traces of humanity. With a new perspective that transcends national states, and that can also penetrate the inner layers of those national states, we can grow an eye reexamining the history of the past. This transnational situation triggered by globalization, or the changes happening inside the Capitalist system today, provides us with a criteria crucial in reinterpreting the past eras, in a transnational context. Transnational history, unlike global history, is not expected to become another paradigm for the next generation. It recognizes the existence of national qualities in the world, and tries to analyze transnational situations based upon that recognition. In that regard, transnational history is also a form and a result of a historical aim. The modem period of Korea, which was dominated under imperial ruling, exhibited transnational conditions in abundance. The interactions between both races and both countries presented a variety of situations, including oppression and conflicts, resistance and collaboration, assimilation and exchanges, and all kinds of mixed conditions, under imperial ruling and colonial occupation. Those were the essence of an imperial ruling by Japan and a colonial experience of the Koreans. As the colony got incorporated into the imperialist system deeper and deeper, transnational conditions became much more complicated and conflicts become much more fierce. So, to interpret, analyze and examine Korean modernity, a transnational perspective can be very useful. The transnational situation of Korean modernity does not allow interpretation of the colonial situation from a perspective used to examining conditions with merely the individual nation in question in consideration. The argument that Korea was stripped and raped by the Japanese imperialism, and the argument that Korea actually went through modernization during the Japanese ruling, are all products of such same limited view, trying to interpret the modernity of Korea in that period, with only the situation of Korea in consideration. Transnational historical studies are way beyond such attempts, tracing the origin of Korean modernity or interpreting it, with only the Korean situation on the plate. Modernity is a global concept. Only when the Korean modernity is read and examined in the context of global modernity, we could come up with a completely different way of interpreting the nature of Korean modernity. The fact that the colony was never a separate, self-sustaining unit but was always part of the empire, and that the empire's center and the colony were interacting with each other to compose a system all the time, should be acknowledged. Perceiving the nature of global modernity of transnational qualities, could lead us to a new kind of historical studies of empires and local regions, different from the traditional and conventional studies of international relationships and comparative studies dealing with multiple nations, which accompanied former attempts of examining history of nations from a singular, individualized fashion. The attempt to determine the overall structure of the entire system engulfing both the empire and the colonies, aspires to determine the connections and overlapping relations between multiple regions and races in the world. In short, historical studies of the empires, starts with the premise that all forms of history dealing with nations and people, are essentially history dealing with empires (and inner regions). This kind of attempt would enable people to recognize the true merit and potential of an East Asian consciousness, which would be a historial reviewing of the East Asian region. Pursuing the history of East Asia as a region could contribute to the reinforcement of cooperation and interdependence among countries in this region in the future. This is another merit that would come from the perspective of transnational history. Transnational historical approaches could widen the horizon of modernity captured in our eyes, and lead us to more studies of empires and regions.

트랜스내셔널 히스토리(Transnational History)의 가능성

If the frequency of specific key words in book titles, series or journal editions are an indicator of the shift within a discipline, transnational history has certainly arrived. Next to other key t...

Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History

By the end of the nineteenth century the global telegraph network had connected all continents and brought distant people into direct communication 'at the speed of thought' for the first time. Roland Wenzlhuemer here examines the links between the development of the telegraph and the paths of globalization, and the ways in which global spaces were transformed by this technological advance. His groundbreaking approach combines cultural studies with social science methodology, including evidence based on historical GIS mapping, to shed new light on both the structural conditions of the global telegraph network and the historical agency of its users. The book reveals what it meant for people to be telegraphically connected or unconnected, how people engaged with the technology, how the use of telegraphy affected communication itself and, ultimately, whether faster communication alone can explain the central role that telegraphy occupied in nineteenth-century globalization.

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Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization

By looking through the lens of a global entrepreneur, this dissertation provides insight into a crucial period in world history: the First Global Economy (1870-1914). To tackle the broader issue of the opportunities and limitations in a paradoxical world of economic globalization and political fragmentation, I take an actor-centered approach. The history of the business empire of the Belgian Edouard Empain (1852-1929) elucidates a complex era characterized by globalization and nation-state formation. By focusing on an entrepreneur originating from a small country but transcending boundaries, the possibilities and risks for international business in this period can be studied. Starting in 1880, the business group of Edouard Empain developed into one of the largest in Belgium and became a global player active on four continents. The Empain group mainly invested in public utilities such as transportation and electricity production as well as in electrical engineering. Within this context, this dissertation answers the following question: What strategies did a multinational enterprise from a small country adopt to seize the opportunities and handle the risks of a world characterized by both economic integration and geopolitical rivalry at a global scale? I argue that, to understand the development of international business in the First Global Economy, we need to acknowledge the importance of the following three domains: the geographical and sectoral strategy, the corporate structure, and the business-government relations. To address these issues, this dissertation uses a wide array of archival sources and secondary literature. It combines a comprehensive approach of the more than eighty Empain companies with selected case studies to understand the dynamics of international business. This allows me to argue that Empain developed strategies in the three abovementioned domains to transform the global economic and political challenges into opportunities. First, his investments were the result of an entrepreneurial logic combined with the pursuit of economies of scale and scope. Secondly, the business group form had many advantages, making it an efficient device for investments in the First Global Economy. Thirdly, thanks to the complex interplay between the multinational enterprise, the home country and the host countries, an entrepreneur from a small country could exploit the international political frictions of the late nineteenth-century world to develop a global business empire.

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8640740/file/8643749.pdf

Beyond Belgium : the business empire of Edouard Empain in the First Global Economy (1880-1914)

Globalization can be interpreted as a dialectical process of de- and re-territorialization. The challenges to existing borders that limit economic, socio-cultural, and political activities, and the establishment of new borders as the result of such activities, bring about certain consolidated structures of spatiality, while at the same time societies develop regulatory regimes to use these structures for purposes of dominance and integration. Global history in our understanding investigates the historical roots of those global conditions that have led to modern globalization and should therefore focus on the historicity of regimes of territorialization and their permanent renegotiation over time. There is, at present, a massive insecurity about patterns of spatiality and appropriate regulatory mechanisms. This article begins with a sketch of this current uncertainty and of two further characteristics of contemporary globalization. The second part examines discussions in the field of global history with regard to processes of de- and re-territorialization. In the third part, we suggest three categories that can serve both as a research agenda and as a perspective according to which a history of globalization can be constructed and narrated.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1740022809990362

Global history and the spatial turn: from the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization.

Actor-centred approaches feature prominently in transnational history. Studying transnational actors has helped to better grasp the extent, dynamics and mechanisms of particular cross-border connec...

Revisiting transnational actors from a spatial perspective

Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective: institutionalization, postcolonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s

Vergessene Vielfalt : Territorialität und Internationalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts

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Katja Naumann

Papers

Global history and the spatial turn: from the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization.

Revisiting transnational actors from a spatial perspective

Long-term and decentred trajectories of doing history from a global perspective: institutionalization, postcolonial critique, and empiricist approaches, before and after the 1970s

Vergessene Vielfalt : Territorialität und Internationalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts

Global History 2008–2010:: Empirische Erträge, konzeptionelle Debatten, neue Synthesen