Discussion: the futures of global history

Abstract

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.

Thinking through Denmark: Connected Art Histories

“…As Richard Drayton and David Motadel have pointed out, 'global historians are often keenly anchored in national history'. 16 Rather than an eschewal of the nation, global history asks how we might move beyond conceptions of the nation state as a stable framework for historical action. Thinking globally -'through' rather than 'in'provides a means of understanding better what that nation is, how it emerged, and how fundamentally unstable it is, politically and culturally.…”

Perspective and Scale in the Architecture of International Legal History

“…41 Moreover, history used to pay no attention to indigenous peoples, the poor, and people from the global South as historical agents. 42 Finally, international legal history has been has become a battleground between different interpretive communities.…”

“…45 Since its establishment in the 1990s, the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement has explored the political, economic, and cultural implications of colonialism in international law. 46 Historians have also explored interdisciplinary tools of analysis to complement written sources, 47 as well as intentionally integrated their research processes and source analysis into the narrative itself. 48 Gaps in the sources, hypothesis, doubts, and uncertainties thus all become part of the narrative.…”

Piecing together suffrage internationalism: Place, space, and connected histories of Australasian women's activism

“…Rather, scholarship that considers the organisational and individual elements of the Australasian campaigns to expand women's rights can demonstrate how the tendrils of internationalism touched all those associated with the suffrage movement. By the late nineteenth century, travel was no longer an elite phenomenon and affected the lives of many more women than a lucky handful of globetrotters (Bishop, ; Drayton & Motadel, , pp. 10–11; Robinson‐Tomsett, ).…”