What Is Global History?

Citation

Conrad, S. (2017). What Is Global History? Princeton University Press. (Paperback edition; hardcover 2016.)

Chapter Summary

The book is a short methodological introduction of about 235 pages of text in ten chapters, followed by some 45 pages of notes and an index. It is not a narrative of the world's past but an account of global history as an approach: where it came from, how it differs from neighbouring approaches, what it can explain and what dangers it carries. Conrad illustrates each argument with short case studies drawn from many regions, with frequent examples from East Asia.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The introduction starts from the observation that history as a discipline was organized around nations, so that even world-history courses can exclude the nation's own past, taught in a different department. Conrad distinguishes several strategies that go under the name of global history, from an "all-in" history of everything to big history spanning the period since the Big Bang, and prepares his own definition of global history as both a process and a perspective.

Chapter 2: A short history of thinking globally

This chapter surveys earlier attempts to write the history of the world: the historians of different ecumenes, such as Ibn Khaldun, who described their own world while considering what lay around it; Enlightenment universal history, including the University of Göttingen; nineteenth-century approaches derived from Marx and from the concept of civilization; and world history after 1945, which was institutionalized more strongly in communist countries, including China, than in the West. Conrad stresses that each of these traditions reflected the concerns and power relations of its own time and place.

Chapter 3: Competing approaches

Conrad compares global history with neighbouring paradigms: comparative history, which he regards as still useful but too inclined to treat cases as independent; transnational history; world-systems theory, which he credits with refusing to take political units as given but criticizes for economistic reductionism and lingering Eurocentrism; and the concept of multiple modernities, whose revival of civilizational thinking he discusses critically. Kenneth Pomeranz's comparison of England and the Yangzi Delta serves as an example of how comparison and connection can be combined.

Chapter 4: Global history as a distinct approach

The core chapter defines what makes global history distinctive. Conrad argues that studying connections and interactions is not enough, since connectedness is part of the human condition at all times. Global history should instead take structured integration on a global scale as the context for its subjects and should raise causation up to the global level, explaining local developments through their place in larger structures.

Chapter 5: Global history and forms of integration

Asking whether global history is simply the history of globalization, the chapter examines how integration has happened: five modes of integration that historians often emphasize (from biological and ecological factors to culture), integration through overlapping structures, and the role of historical actors who pursued competing globalizing projects. Conrad insists that integration was not a natural or steady process and that the approach is most powerful for periods of dense connection, particularly from the sixteenth century onwards.

Chapter 6: Space in global history

This chapter looks for spatial units of analysis other than the nation and argues for moving between scales rather than privileging the global. A single place, such as the silver-mining city of Potosí, can be related to national, regional, trans-Pacific and global levels, and the journey of African American graduates of Tuskegee to German Togo in 1900 illustrates how local, colonial and inter-imperial spaces interlocked around cotton.

Chapter 7: Time in global history

Conrad examines how global perspectives affect periodization and time frames. He discusses deep history and big history, whose proponents expand time frames dramatically, and is sceptical of approaches that turn the past into a province of the natural sciences. He argues instead for combining different layers of time (Zeitschichten) and attending to synchronicity, using the history of Chinese capitalism as an example.

Chapter 8: Positionality and centered approaches

The chapter asks where historians stand when they write the history of the world. Conrad accepts the critique of Eurocentrism and the argument, drawn from postcolonial studies, that every perspective is positioned, but warns against new centrisms and nativism. Positionality, he argues, is shaped not only by culture but by institutions and by unequal integration into global structures of knowledge production.

Chapter 9: World-making and the concepts of global history

Here global history is treated as a form of world-making: historians do not simply find the world, they shape it through concepts. Conrad discusses how historians "make worlds with words", asks how neutral terms such as "world" and "global" are, and argues that the formatting of the world through conceptual language has had real effects on the social order.

Chapter 10: Global history for whom? The politics of global history

The final chapter considers the politics of the field: its uses in national projects, such as the revival of Zheng He's voyages in China, its risk of celebrating mobility and connection while ignoring those who were settled or disadvantaged, and its relation to inequality. Conrad ends by suggesting that the gradual disappearance of the rhetoric of the "global" will signal the victory of global history as a paradigm.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: Origins and Neighbours

• Global history: both a process (global integration) and a perspective (a way of framing historical questions).
• World-systems theory: Immanuel Wallerstein's approach that starts from large economic systems rather than nations.
• Multiple modernities: the idea that there are many paths to modernity, which Conrad discusses critically.

Chapters 4–5: The Distinct Approach

• Connectedness: links and exchanges across borders, which Conrad sees as necessary but insufficient for global history.
• Structured integration: the systematic global context within which local events are placed.
• Causation at the global level: explaining developments through their relation to global structures, not only through local factors.

Chapters 6–7: Space and Time

• Scale: the choice of spatial level of analysis, which global historians should vary rather than fix.
• Deep and big history: very long time frames, reaching back tens of thousands of years or to the Big Bang.
• Synchronicity: the simultaneous occurrence of developments in different places, as a tool for global analysis.

Chapters 8–10: Perspective and Politics

• Eurocentrism: treating Europe as the norm or the motor of world history.
• Positionality: the dependence of every interpretation on the historian's location in the world.
• World-making: the way historians' concepts shape the world they describe.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear definition of the field. The publisher presents the book as the first comprehensive overview of global history as an approach, and Chapter 4 gives a precise account of what distinguishes it from the study of mere connections.
• Fair comparison with rival approaches. Chapter 3 credits comparative history, world-systems theory and others with real achievements while setting out specific criticisms, which helps students see why scholars choose one approach over another.
• Critical about its own field. The chapters on positionality, world-making and the politics of global history discuss the dangers of the approach, including new centrisms, the fetishization of mobility and the neglect of those who did not move.
• Concrete examples and thorough notes. Case studies from Potosí to Qing China and colonial Togo anchor the arguments, and the extensive notes form a bibliography of the field.

Limitations

• Methodological, not narrative. The book does not tell the history of the world, so students need a survey alongside it to supply the content the examples assume.
• Abstract in places. Chapters 4, 5 and 9 deal with concepts such as integration, causation and world-making and are more demanding than the book's length suggests; some general reading in modern history is helpful.
• A snapshot of a moving field. The text reflects debates up to its publication in 2016; environmental history and the digital humanities, for example, appear only briefly, in the discussion of time frames.

Where It Fits in the Course

Conrad's book is the methods companion for this course. Read early, it explains the questions behind the large surveys: Bulliet and colleagues' The Earth and Its Peoples, Bentley, Ziegler and Streets Salter's Traditions and Encounters, Strayer and Nelson's Ways of the World and Tignor and colleagues' Worlds Together, Worlds Apart all organize world history in different ways, and Conrad's chapters on integration, space and time give a vocabulary for judging their choices.

The course's research monographs can then be read as examples of the approaches Conrad describes. Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony, a study of a thirteenth-century world system, shows world-systems thinking applied before 1500; Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World is a large-scale global history of the nineteenth century; and David Christian's Maps of Time is a work of big history, the very long time frame that Conrad's Chapter 7 discusses sceptically. Regional books such as the Very Short Introduction to the Aztecs, Keen and Haynes's A History of Latin America and Gelvin's The Modern Middle East offer cases for testing his arguments about scale.

How to Use This Book

The book is accessible to readers with some general knowledge of modern history and no specialist training; it suits undergraduates beginning a world or global history course, and is also useful for postgraduates designing global research projects.

• Core chapters: Chapters 1, 3 and 4 give the definition of the field and its relation to other approaches; read these first.
• Read Chapters 6–7 alongside the surveys, asking how each survey divides space and time.
• Use Chapters 8–10 for essays on Eurocentrism, perspective or the politics of history.
• Follow the notes. They point to key works for each approach and debate, and are a good source for essay bibliographies.
• Apply the approach. Take one topic from a survey, such as silver, cotton or migration, and ask Conrad's question: what larger structured integration does it belong to, and does placing it there change the explanation?