Eurocentrism and the Politics of Global History

Alessandro Stanziani

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319947396
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319947402
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Global history locates national histories in the context of broader processes, in which the West is not necessarily synonymous with progress. And yet it often suffers from the same Eurocentrism that plagues national history, accepting Western categories and values uncritically and largely ignoring non-English historiographies. Alessandro Stanziani examines these tensions and asks what global history is and ought to be. Drawing upon a wide array of sources, he historicizes global history writing from the sixteenth century onward, tracing the forces of revolution, globalization, totalitarianism, colonization, decolonization and the Cold War. By considering global history in the context of a longue durée, multipolar perspective, this book assesses the strengths and limits of the field, and clarifies what is at stake.

© The Author(s) 2018

Alessandro StanzianiEurocentrism and the Politics of Global Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94740-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Why We Need Global History

Alessandro Stanziani¹

(1)

EHESS and CNRS, Paris, France

Alessandro Stanziani

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the main approaches to global history in the twenty-first century. World history, history of globalization, comparative and connected history, and subaltern studies are presented at length. The critics and definition of Eurocentrism and other forms of historical centrisms (Sinocentrism, Africa-centrism, and so on) are equally discussed. This chapter argues that the solution to long-standing Western domination in historical tools and writing does not consist so much in replacing one centrism with another (although this is somewhat necessary) as in overcoming the using of history as a clash of civilizations’ perspectives.

Keywords

Global historyConnected historyWorld historyEurocentrismGreat divergence

End Abstract

On Thursday, 24 November 2016, former Prime Minister of France François Fillon declared there was an urgent need to rewrite history: in his view, too much attention was being given in schools to world history and not enough to France and its values. Two years earlier, in September 2014, Vladimir Putin had announced that Russian textbooks henceforth would go back to recounting the country’s patriotic history. On 12 February 2017, Donald Trump tweeted that American schoolchildren needed to learn about the history of the United States and its political parties.

I thought about my own students: some of them are French, Russian and Chinese, others are European and African; there are also a few Americans, two Indians, some Brazilians, and one Japanese. What should I be teaching them: the history of France, the history of Europe, or the history of the world?

In class on that Thursday, 24 November, I seemed unsure of the answer. And I was. So I asked the students: “When I use the expression ‘global history’, what do you think of?”

Their replies varied: an American student said: “capitalism and American power”. A student from École Normale Supérieure answered confidently: “connected history”. At first, the Japanese student appeared intimidated, then whispered: “world history”. Finally, one of the Indian students mentioned colonial history and imperialism, and a Senegalese student concluded, with a hint of annoyance: “Professor, global history is just one more gimmick invented by the North to control the South”. I thought to myself: each of these students is partly right; global history is indeed a bit of everything they mentioned. But why should Trump, Putin, or Fillon, not to mention Le Pen, be so worried about it?

This book is an attempt to answer that question. At first glance, the answer seems simple: global history refers to various approaches designed to decompartmentalize national histories and Eurocentric paradigms that interpret the planet and its history and diversity using the yardstick of a few Western categories and values. On the contrary, what global history really does is view the history of each country as part of broader processes in which the role of the West is not necessarily synonymous with progress. This way of thinking and engaging in history developed in response to the major phenomena of our time since 1989: first, the end of the “two blocs”, communist and capitalist; second, globalization and its effects; and, finally, the return to nationalism. All too often, these phenomena encourage us to view the historical process itself as a clash of civilizations. Global history seeks other solutions.

Thinking globally requires a journey into worlds that are different but interconnected. History can never be reduced to national history: every country—every steeple in France, as Fernand Braudel once said—is connected to other countries and even to other worlds. Engaging in history from a global perspective does more than merely satisfy intellectual curiosity, for it is constantly being called upon to provide context for contemporary political debates.

Since the 1600s, discussions about the nature of “historical truth” and how to demonstrate it have been rooted in global processes: Western expansion, revolutions, capitalism, colonization and decolonization, totalitarianism and the Cold War, up to and including globalization today. Ever since the globalization in the seventeenth century, there have been two opposing currents: the ardent supporters of globalization, on the one hand, and those who, for various reasons, were frightened by it and sought refuge in national identity. Global history as an expression of global thinking has often been a global practice as well, in the twofold sense, first of connecting different cultures and bodies of knowledge and second of seeking to achieve a comprehensive understanding of societies. The rise of nationalism in politics as well as history and hostility toward “others”—what Freud designated as “uncomfortable strangeness” (das Unheimliche)—have accompanied globalization in the past and even more in recent years. This was not the only possible outcome, however, and it is necessary to understand how it came about.

The detour we are about to make through history is not the whim of a historian trying to justify his profession by showing that “there is nothing new under the sun”. On the contrary, it is precisely because the world has given rise to different kinds of global history and different forms of globalization that it is important to distinguish what is happening now from analogous phenomena that occurred in the past. This means we must simultaneously reject the hypothesis that today’s world, contemporary globalization, and global history writing are totally unprecedented and, conversely, that history and history writing have been nothing but a series of successive globalizations from prehistoric times to the present. Thus, since antiquity and especially since the second millennium of our era (Chapter 2), there have been important connections between the Euro-Asiatic and African worlds as well as with respect to historiographical knowledge.¹ Voyages, along with historical methods and books, connected the Arabo-Muslim, Chinese, and Indian worlds to one another and connected these regions to Europe and Africa. Contrary to received opinion, Renaissance Europe did not invent early modern and scholarly historiography alone but rather borrowed from previous centuries as well as other worlds. It also added new elements, such as philology and erudition, along with law and economic and anthropological reflections about “the others”. Most important, these tools were part of state and empire building, deeply different in Asia and the West.

A process that some called “global enlightenment”,² widespread in all the continents, stressed these dynamics (Chapter 3) but also provided a new perspective in which a plurality of worlds was less at issue than universalist visions; in the West, this attitude often took the form of civilizationist pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Why We Need Global History
• 2. Connected Historiographies in Expanding Worlds: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• 3. Inventing Modernity
• 4. The End of the Old Order: History, Nationalisms, and Totalitarianism
• 5. Global History in the Cold War and Decolonization
• 6. Conclusion: Global History in the Face of Globalization and the Return of Nationalisms
• Back Matter