Overview

Despite three decades of rapid expansion and public success, global history's theoretical and methodological foundations remain under-conceptualised, even to those using them. In this collection of essays, leading historians provide a reassessment of global history's most common analytical instruments, metaphors and conceptual foundations. Rethinking Global History prompts historians to pause and think about the methodology and premises underpinning their work. The volume reflects on the structure and direction of history, its relation to our present and the ways in which historians should best explain, contextualise and represent events and circumstances in the past. In chapters on fundamental concepts such as scale, comparison, temporality and teleology, this collection will guide readers to assess the extant literature critically and write theoretically informed global histories. Taken together, these essays provide a unique and much-needed assessment of the implications of history going global. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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9781009444026

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Reviews

'In this book a group of well-known practitioners provide a multifaceted analysis of the concepts, methods, and issues that will define future scholarship in Global History. If this branch of history is here to stay, then historians should embrace the full conceptual rearmament here discussed to write histories worthy of the problems affecting today's world.' Giorgio Riello, European University Institute and the University of Warwick 'What a timely intervention! As global history is coming of age, and as the world around us changes, our methods and approaches will have to develop as well. As the talk of de-globalization proliferates, Jürgen Osterhammel and Stefanie Gänger have assembled a group of first-class historians to rethink global history for our times. Fresh, insightful, stimulating.' Sebastian Conrad, Professor of Global History, Freie Universität Berlin

Author Information

Stefanie Gänger is Professor of Modern History at the Heidelberg University. She is the author of A Singular Remedy. Cinchona Across the Atlantic World, 1751–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Jürgen Osterhammel is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. His books in English include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014). With Akira Iriye, he is the general editor of A History of the World (6 vols., Harvard University Press, 2012–24).

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