Global History

At the turn of the twentieth century, Imperial Germany embarked on an ambitious expansion and modernizing of its navy to establish itself as a global power. Inspired by Captain Alfred Mahan’s sea-power theory, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, State Secretary of the German Navy, contended that the continued economic growth of…

I grew up in Texas, two generations off of a farm where my ancestors tilled potatoes for three hundred years. My people raised me on a steady diet of religious instruction about love, justice, and mercy for all. I was thirty when I heard about the farmer suicides in the…

The “network” that is the International Land Coalition is a representative polity of NGO’s whose members represent perhaps 1 billion indigenous people, nomads, pastoralists, peasants, and women’s cooperatives across the global South. Their members perhaps do more than any other known sector to keep carbon in the ground, although they…

During a conference on the First World War and neutrality in 2014 my friend and colleague Maartje Abbenhuis and I realized that somehow something was wrong…But what? First World War historiography had long moved on from being mainly Western front centered to paying attention to other fronts, places and people…

From Firenze University Press Journal: Cromohs — Pamela K. Crossley, Dartmouth College The frequency with which books appear announcing a “new” approach to “global history” by invoking this or that theory from historical sociology is puzzling, since what we casually call “global history” obviously is and has always been historical sociology. It has never been history as…

From Firenze University Press Journal: Cromohs — Pamela K. Crossley, Dartmouth College Historians seem to have difficulty accepting that “global history” is not historiography but is historical sociology. Since the discourse of global history as historical sociology is long and prominent, this difficulty is a problem in itself. …

From Firenze University Press Journal: Cromohs — Alessandro Stanziani, EHESS and CNRS, Paris In 1949, Fernand Braudel proposed a view of the Mediterranean in which part of the Muslim World appeared integral to Europe. This was a courageous act. At the very moment when, after the Second World War, Europe was reflecting on its unity and the…

Earlier today, I read Dave Anderson’s Nov 21 2020 article Democrats fell into the language trap — again. The following lines in his piece, in particular, caught my eye: The Democratic Party has fallen into the language trap again, only this time they themselves have used some of the key…

Global history of Pandemics and our poor reaction to Covid-19; what we keep missing to learn and act When the global crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic is still reaching zenith, someone should already be thinking about the world the day after. These lines are dedicated, as a reflection, to…