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Writing Global History and Its Challenges—A Workshop with Jürgen Osterhammel and Geoffrey Parker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2016

Martine van Ittersum ,
Felicia Gottmann  and
Tristan Mostert
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Abstract

On 4 June 2016, Jürgen Osterhammel of the University of Konstanz and Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on global history for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universities of Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of three discussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely the conceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. The central question was to what extent this fast-changing field required adjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies and epistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses in particular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yet reconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities. In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have been ordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheral spaces, for example—and imposed by certain groups of people on others, resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenous peoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples or areas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where does globalization end?

Keywords

Global historyhistory of empireenvironmental historyJürgen OsterhammelGeoffrey Parker
Type
Conference Report
Information
Itinerario , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , December 2016 , pp. 357 - 376
Copyright
© 2016 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Martine van Ittersum is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Dundee. She is the author of Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). She has published widely on the history of international law and on the theory and practice of Western imperialism and colonialism, particularly in the early modern period. Felicia Gottmann is the Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in History at the University of Dundee. She is the author of Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Tristan Mostert is a Ph.D. student at the University of Leiden, researching the political, diplomatic, and military interactions between the Dutch East India Company and the Sultanate of Makassar.

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