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

Abstract

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.

International Law and History

“…This, as a modern historiographical trend, is generally retraced to a celebrated monograph by William McNeill in 1963, 55 which, according to Patrick Manning, 'made it possible for historians to consider world history as academically feasible, and not simply philosophically speculative'. 56 Over the next years, the new historiographical trend became institutionalized with the founding of the World History Association (1982) and the launch of the Journal of World History (1990), devoted to historical studies from a global point of view. 57 Contemporary with these historiographical developments was, in international legal history, the transcivilizational approach to the history of international law most notoriously associated with the Japanese scholar Onuma Yasuaki.…”