The Global History tradition

Strands such as Global History, World System History and World-Systems Analysis take an original position in the levels of analysis debate, as they consider the social reality at world scale, including its past and future, as one ontological reality. The structural interconnections across time and space hold explanatory value in their own right. Drayton and Motadel define the Global History approach as follows (Drayton & Motadel, 2018):

Global history is an approach to the past which has two key modes. On the one hand, the comparative approach seeks to understand events in one place through examining their similarities with and differences from how things happened somewhere else. This is opposed to, or combined with, the connective approach, which elucidates how history is made through the interactions of geographically (or temporally) separate historical communities. Both of these are very old, although the connected and egalitarian terms on which the world’s histories met by the late twentieth century gave them radically new meanings.

Studying the history of the world as such is very far from new. Ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman, and later, Arab historians already conceptualized their own empires in constant relationship with outsiders. The 19th century historian Leopold von Ranke as an expert of national histories was well aware of Europe’s transnational history shaped by the common Christendom as well as the great migrations, Crusades, and colonialism. Yet, much historiography and IR theory-building in the 19th and 20th century paralleled European imperialist expansion with its Eurocentrism and marginalization of the proper agency and histories of peoples of the Global South.

It were post-1950 evolutions that shaped the global history tradition (Drayton & Motadel, 2018). Decolonization and the emergence of ‘history from below’ helped to make history more equal and inclusive, and to make the agency of non-Western peoples, and in the West, subordinate groups such as women, the poor and minorities, more visible. In 1990 the Journal of World History was founded; according to its founder Jerry Bentley, it would “foster historical analysis undertaken not from the viewpoint of national states, but rather from that of the global community.” In 2003 the Journal of Global History saw the light. Global history (Conrad, 2016) is said to focus more on the history of globalization as such, although disagreement lingers on over whether there is a meaningful difference between ‘world’ or ‘global history’ (Drayton & Motadel, 2018).

From this viewpoint, we consider international politics as being shaped to an important degree by the history of the ever more interconnected world. Connection and globalization are key concepts. Interestingly, scholars in this tradition also regard past and current upsurges of ethno-nationalism or religious fundamentalism as reactions to global historical processes, such as (neo)colonialism, (neo)imperialism and neoliberal globalization. In this sense, it is for example hard to understand the Muslim Brotherhood while leaving out its roots in the Islamic opposition to Britain’s rule in Egypt in the 1920-‘30s. In the same vein, right-wing populism in the West flourished in the context of growing socio-economic uncertainty, due to deepening financial-economic globalization. Anti-globalization movements calling for the full restitution of national states vis-à-vis markets and international organizations, trade protectionism and closed borders, often exhibit a transnational dimension, when they inspire each other and even organize across borders. This was for example demonstrated by the global networking efforts of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Global history does not mean that the regional, national an local histories have become less relevant. Very much to the contrary, studies at those scales are enriched by bringing in connections with the global, and vice versa (Drayton & Motadel, 2018).

With his proposal of World System History, Richard Denemark brings Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis de facto more in line with the Global History approach (Denemark, 1999). Some strands within the postcolonial tradition equally adopt a geographically and temporally holistic perspective, even though it can be combined with the appreciation of other levels. They share the realization that imperialism and colonialism have shaped the world order with a lasting legacy until this day.