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David Abulafia, What is Global History?, by Sebastian Conrad
The Prospect of Global History, ed. James Belich, John Darwin, Margaret Frenz and Chris Wickham, The English Historical Review, Volume 133, Issue 561, April 2018, Pages 383–385, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cey007 - Share Icon Share
Extract
History has taken many twists and turns in the last half-century—a cultural turn, a material turn, the body turn and even a temporary turn away from economic history—but some at least have been short-lived fashions, or even re-statements of topics that had long been discussed under other labels and had simply been dressed up in new clothes (even, occasionally, the emperor’s clothes) to make them sound more innovative than they really were. There is a different feel to the ‘global turn’, a sense that the writing of history cannot slip back into old obsessions and certainties. Just consider the changes to syllabuses in British universities and schools: where once the emphasis was squarely on English, and then British, history, with a good smattering of European as well, there are now offerings, even to seventeen year olds, of subjects such as the career of Mao or the Vietnam War. The objection to this statement might be that American history has long been taught and studied outside the United States, and that British universities have taken a powerful interest in the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English or British Empires. Yet when J.H. Plumb introduced extra-European history to the syllabus at Cambridge, it was understood as the history of Europeans in the rest of the world. When he edited the brief but excellent series History of Human Society, the most notable volumes were those on ‘Seaborne Empires’, with Boxer on the Portuguese and the Dutch, and Parry on the Spaniards—works that have stood the test of time.