What Is Global History? And Why Should We Care About the “Global” in History?

For several decades, the notion of globalization has circulated in social and political discourse. Although the term’s origins date back to the early 20th century, its exponential usage only occurred in the last decade of the previous century across various fields of economic, sociological, and cultural studies. Globalization’s precise content is difficult to pinpoint and depends on whether economic or cultural aspects are prioritized in the analysis. Nevertheless, one could convincingly argue that it consists in the reciprocal integration of the world through overarching structural processes that transcend national borders and geographical barriers. In other words, what happens in one place — be it a city, a region, or a country — no longer stays there and, depending on its significance, sooner or later exerts its impact on the rest of the globe. Under these circumstances, the notion of global integration is evoked in a non-normative, analytical sense, implying that the entanglement of various national and supranational entities has brought about a world in which actions undertaken on the local level cannot disregard the larger global trends.

In the decades after the Second World War, the more common term used to escribe the no-longer ignorable fact of global integration was "interdependence", which still assumed the primacy of national autonomy in a country’s interconnectedness with others. However, in the 1970s, certain moments of overwhelming symbolic significance fundamentally transformed people’s perception of the “global.” One could point to The Blue Marble photograph of Earth, taken from Apollo 17 on its way to the Moon in December 1972, which soon became one of the most well-known photographs in history. The enthusiasm for technological advancement represented by this picture, however, was, accompanied by recognition of the darker side of the industrial development, as the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth, also published in 1972, became another landmark moment in acknowledging global integration — this time from an environmental perspective—insisting on the limits of how far humanity could go in exploiting natural resources.

It was in this context that historians began to reconsider the analytical tools they had long applied to investigate their subjects of study. From the 1990s onward, after the American sociologist Saskia Sassen’s 1991 book Global Cities made a major impact in the social sciences by arguing for the existence of a new phenomenon within the global landscape, historians began to ask themselves similar questions: To what extent is it viable to continue investigating events in the past solely within the confines of nation-states? How can new units of analysis (such as global cities) serve as starting points for processes that stemmed from multiple locations, or originated from transnational processes such as international trade? To name some examples: How did the Atlantic trade of goods such as sugar, coffee, or tobacco—produced only in the colonies—influence the Industrial Revolution in Europe, a historical event that had until then largely been investigated as a European rather than a global phenomenon? What can the trade of these commodities tell us about the process of global economic integration? How did the abolitionist movement against slavery and slave trade—phenomena that were essentially global—impact the rise of liberal politics in Britain and Europe? When did the process that the American economist Joseph Stiglitz critically analyzed in his 2002 book Globalization and its Discontents actually begin?

Following this new approach of formulating questions with global content, historians adopted global history as both a normative and a methodological framework. The normative aspect was largely inspired by the academic discipline of postcolonial studies, which, influenced by literary inquiries strongly inspired by Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, applied methods of discourse analysis on the European colonial rule and its aftermath. The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 1992 article Provincializing Europe, which argued against European exceptionalism and insisted on placing European history within the broader context of global history, soon became a blueprint for this normative approach.

The methodological aspect emphasized the importance of conducting comparative analyses of transnational processes to gain insights into how variations in the impact of these processes across different regional or national contexts can be explained. In another classic of the field, The Great Divergence (2000), the prominent British historian Kenneth Pomeranz proposed a radical rethinking of Europe’s rise to wealth and power in the 19th century by arguing that the continent’s leap forward only occurred from the mid-17th century. He supported this thesis with a wide array of empirical evidence showing that, until then, core regions in China and India enjoyed similar levels of prosperity to European heartlands and that, had it not been for Britain’s easy access to coal mines and European rulers’ possession of colonies, it might well have been Chinese or Indian empires that made the transition to the industrial age.

Along with these international scholars, historians in Germany also began to pioneer the field of global history. Among them, Jürgen Osterhammel wrote a towering history of the 19th century in his 2009 book "Die Verwandlung der Welt". Continuing in the footsteps of the eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who had previously coined the term "the long-19th century" and authored a definitive account of European modernity, Osterhammel elevated the writing of that transformative century’s history to a new, global scale. A similar milestone was also achieved by Sebastian Conrad who, by specializing in the history of German colonialism, significantly contributed through multiple works to a stronger incorporation of the German colonial experience into the country’s modern history.

In parallel with the geographical dimension of global history, the question of temporality also arises. If we accept global integration as a fact, from what time or period in history was it no longer possible for local entities to continue their existence in isolation? In this regard, there is a consensus in the historical literature that provides a clear answer: global integration reached completion in the second half of the 19th century, more precisely in the 1880s. Karl Marx incisively wrote in his 1848 Communist Manifesto of the "cosmopolitan character" of the world market, which rendered "old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency" impossible and created an "interdependence of nations". However, it was only in the ensuing decades that this process truly broke all regional barriers and integrated various parts of the globe into the world market economy. This was achieved through forceful territorial expansions around the globe, such as the final settlement of the Pacific coasts in the US (which brought the entirety of the North American continent under European settlers’ rule), the increasing exploration of the African hinterlands, especially in the aftermath of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, the opening of Japan to global trade and modernization culminating in the Meiji Restoration, and the Russian intrusion into the Central Asian Steppe. These territorial expansions were facilitated by technological leaps forward, including the construction of nation-wide railways in the United States, India, and Russia, the invention of telecommunication technologies such as the telegraph and the popular press, the rapid development of steamships, and the opening of new water ways, most notably the Suez Canal. These reconfigurations strengthen the argument that since then, it has become virtually impossible for any country to live in isolation from others, thus transforming modern history into an essentially global one.

As is clear, European colonialism played an indispensable role in creating the globalized world. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the process of global integration was kickstarted by colonialism. It was European merchants who first began trading spices from the Indian Ocean to their homelands, thereby creating a new economic relationship between two regions that had until then developed in isolation from one another. Similarly, the European slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas fundamentally changed the demographics of the three continents involved in the Atlantic triangle: European colonizers brought enslaved workers from Africa to the so-called sugar islands in the Caribbean, had them produce commodities that were then exported to the European markets, and thus interconnected the fates of the three continents. This circumstance, however, also illuminates the double-sidedness of the process of global integration: industrialization went hand in hand with colonialism. What brought about unprecedented wealth and prosperity in Western Europe meant misery and dehumanization for millions of enslaved people and indentured laborers from other continents. In the long run, this inherent duality of globalization has resulted in what is known as unequal integration: while a globalized whole has indeed emerged, the patterns by which various elements of this whole profit from integration remain undeniably unjust. Global history’s moral mission can thus be seen as investigating how these unjust patterns came about to gain insights into how to change them today.

In conclusion, these characteristics can be summarized in two key points. First, global history seeks to move away from nationalism and from telling history solely from a national perspective, which in most cases leads to various forms of national exceptionalism. Second, global history defines itself in opposition to a Eurocentric image of history, in which the history of modernization as it occurred in Europe provides a model for the rest of the world and assumes that advances in technology and science are largely European achievements, disregarding the contributions of other peoples throughout history. With these objectives in mind, global historians attempt to construct a global narrative suitable for the 21st century, contributing to the wider understanding of how processes of trade, cultural exchange, and migration created the cosmopolitan world we live in today.