Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
Maxine Berg
Abstract
This book brings together a number of the major historians now entering the field, and rethinking the way they write their histories. The book includes the reflections of China experts, historians of India and Japan, of Latin America, Africa, and Europe on their past writing, and the new directions in which global history is taking them. The book shows the rapid advances in the field from early and inspiring questions of encounters between East and West, of the wealth and poverty of nations — why are we so rich and they so poor? — and the crisis of empires to new thinking on global material cu ... More
This book brings together a number of the major historians now entering the field, and rethinking the way they write their histories. The book includes the reflections of China experts, historians of India and Japan, of Latin America, Africa, and Europe on their past writing, and the new directions in which global history is taking them. The book shows the rapid advances in the field from early and inspiring questions of encounters between East and West, of the wealth and poverty of nations — why are we so rich and they so poor? — and the crisis of empires to new thinking on global material cultures, on composite zones and East Asian development paths. It presents historians at a crossroads: enjoying the great excitement of moving out of national borders and reconnecting parts of the world once studied separately, but also facing the huge challenge of new methodologies of comparison, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and the problems of the rapidly disappearing tools of foreign languages.
Keywords:
global history,
world history,
area studies,
great divergence,
empire,
national histories,
regions,
cosmopolitanism,
environment,
material culture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780197265321 |
| Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: January 2014 |
DOI:10.5871/bacad/9780197265321.001.0001 |
