“What is the ‘Global’ in Global History?”
7 July
Presented in Part 1 of the Panel “Competing Notions of the Global”, moderated by Simon Godart. 16:30 – 18:00 (Berlin time).
In the current surge of turning our histories, literatures, philosophies etc. more global, the “world” is frequently assumed, and not sufficiently problematized. But neither “world” nor “global” are self-evident, naturally existing categories. How can global history become more than a series of large-scale national histories? In this talk, I will discuss what scholars do when they analyze the dissemination of ideas, forms of knowledge, or institutions. How did human rights, the idea of progress, the naturalist novel, liberalism, the nation-state turn global? I will argue that it is productive to focus heuristically on three dimensions – the message, circulation, and resonance – when making sense of, and explaining, global reach.
Introduction by Simon Godart, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 3 “Future Perfect”
Sebastian Conrad is Professor of History at Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently interested primarily in trans-national and global history approaches and their contribution to an understanding of the interactions and entanglements of the past. He has a background in both modern Western European and Japanese history, and he has worked on issues of colonialism and post-colonialism, trans-nationalism, intellectual history, memory, and historiography. His publications include “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review 117 (2012), 999-1027;Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010); The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century (University of California Press, 2010; What is Global History? (Princeton University Press, 2016). In 2018, he edited (together with Jürgen Osterhammel) volume 4 of the book series A History of the World, with the title An Emerging Modern World, 1750-1870 (Harvard University Press).
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