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 the histories of the nation and the local, individuals, outsiders, and subalterns, and 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.
This essay surveys literature on the engagement of different European empires, including the French, British, Dutch, Russian, and German, with Islam. While the history of Islam and empire has attracted the attention of scholars for decades, most of their studies have been written primarily as contributions to the historiography of a specific empire or a distinct geographic region and rarely refer to research on other imperial powers, even though the questions and themes raised are remarkably similar. The article brings together these studies, exploring the following topics: Islam and imperial rule and, in particular, the ways in which religious institutions were accommodated and controlled in the colonial state; Islam and anti-imperial resistance; and the relationship between Islam, information, and colonial knowledge. It assesses the dominant themes in the field and points to a number of questions that remain to be studied.
, the day after the UK EU referendum, right-wing nationalists across Europe (and beyond) were united in their jubilation, hailing the result as a victory of the supremacy of the nation over a crumbling liberal order. From the Front National's party headquarters outside Paris, a triumphant Marine Le Pen announced the beginning of a 'patriotic' international 'movement' that 'can't be stopped'. In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders celebrated the referendum's 'huge consequences', declaring that the people needed 'a national identity', 'to rally around a flag'. In Germany, Frauke Petry proclaimed that the time was ripe to 'mobilise' all nationalist forces 'across all borders' to forge a 'Europe of fatherlands'. Her deputy, Beatrix von Storch, said she had 'wept for joy'. The transnational chorus of nationalists also included Hungary's Victor Orban, Italy's Matteo Salvini, Denmark's Kristian Thulesen Dahl, Austria's Heinz-Christian Strache and many others. From a golf course in Scotland, presidential candidate Donald Trump hailed the vote as a 'great thing', seeing a 'big parallel' to the mood in the United States where people also wanted to 'take their borders back'. Demonstrating a remarkable degree of solidarity, they felt energised, bridging parochial nationalism and cosmopolitan internationalism. The United Kingdom's 'Leave' campaign needs to be understood as a part of a much longer history of right-wing international networks and shared aspirations. The phenomenon is hardly new. Transnational bonds between right-wing nationalist movements are as old as these movements themselves. United in a global struggle against their liberal and socialist enemies, nationalists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries operated not only in national but also in transnational and international spaces. Historically, as we have been reminded by scholars like Patricia Clavin, Jessica Reinisch and Glenda Sluga, nationalism and internationalism have always been closely intertwined. Crossing national boundaries, nationalists have often also been remarkably cosmopolitan. Although scholars have shown great interest in the study of cosmopolitanism, both as an idea and as a practice performed by humans across the world, with diverse forms contingent on historical circumstances, they have predominantly assumed it to be the opposite of nationalism. Yet particularist nationalism and universalist cosmopolitanism are not necessarily incompatible. In theoretical terms cosmopolitanism is only possible (thinkable), dialectically, if there is a conception of the own (and multiple others), individual or (and) collective. Cosmopolitanism may well accommodate national differences. As a consequence a cosmopolitanism which implicitly recognises national differences can also be embraced by nationalists. Whether they have done so in practice has depended on historical circumstances. Usually the cosmopolitanism of right-wing nationalists, which we may call 'reactionary cosmopolitanism', has served as a means to pursue their concrete ...
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