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Deglobalizing the Global History of Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Stephen W. Sawyer
Stephen W. Sawyer*
Affiliation:
The American University of [email protected]
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Abstract

This article argues that recent global histories of Europe represent just one quite specific mode of global awareness in a long history of European global historical and social scientific consciousness. There is no doubt that our understanding of the European past would be more than ill-served by misplaced isolationism or the simple rejection of the massive scientific gains made by global history. Yet recent shifts in the structures, technologies, and modes of the globalization inherited from the post-Cold War world push us to reconsider how that global interconnectedness was achieved. European history after our most recent “global turn” must take into account previous modes of global consciousness and examine how globalization itself has been shaped by this knowledge. Indeed, past understanding of global interconnectedness did not necessarily lead to more open borders, increased interdependency, or growing cultural fluidity. Dis-integrating and downscaling modes of social organization were invented and reinvigorated in response to perceived global forces. There were also conscious attempts to channel the fruits and accumulations of global processes based on an awareness of their potentially enriching and destabilizing impact. These efforts to take control of globalization did not stop it, but they did give it a specific shape in particular moments. As a case in point, the article argues that the half-century following the French Revolution witnessed what might be called a deglobalizing globalization: a moment when the global integration that many considered responsible for the upheaval of the Revolution certainly did not stop, but was redirected in the service of a sovereign nation through the birth of new modes of social science and history writing.

Résumé

Résumé

Cet article soutient que les récentes histoires globales de l’Europe ne représentent qu’un mode très spécifique de conscience globale dans l’historiographie et les sciences sociales européennes. S’il ne fait aucun doute que notre compréhension du passé européen serait plus que desservie par un isolationnisme mal à propos ou le simple rejet des considérables gains scientifiques de l’histoire globale, les récents changements dans les structures, les technologies et les modes de la mondialisation héritée de l’après-guerre froide nous poussent à reconsidérer la manière dont cette interconnexion globale s’est effectivement réalisée à d’autres époques et en particulier au xixe siècle. L’histoire européenne après notre plus récent « tournant global » doit tenir compte des modes antérieurs de conscience globale et examiner comment la mondialisation elle-même s’est en retour vue façonnée par cette connaissance. En effet, la compréhension passée de l’interconnexion mondiale n’a pas nécessairement favorisé l’ouverture des frontières, une interdépendance ou une fluidité culturelle croissantes. Ainsi, en réponse aux forces mondiales perçues, des modes d’organisation sociale de désintégration et de réduction d’échelle émergèrent et se consolidèrent. On a également pu assister à des tentatives de canalisation des bénéfices de ces processus mondiaux à la suite de la prise de conscience de leurs retombées potentiellement enrichissantes et déstabilisantes. Ces efforts de contrôle de la mondialisation ne l’ont pas empêchée, mais lui ont donné une forme spécifique à des moments particuliers. À titre d’exemple, l’article soutient que la demi-siècle qui a suivi la Révolution française a été le témoin de ce que l’on pourrait appeler une globalisation déglobalisante, soit un moment où l’intégration mondiale, que beaucoup considéraient comme responsable du bouleversement de la Révolution, ne s’est certainement pas arrêtée, mais s’est vue réorientée au service d’une nation souveraine par la naissance de nouveaux modes d’écriture des sciences sociales et de l’histoire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2022

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References

1 Paul B. Cheney, “The French Revolution’s Global Turn and Capitalism’s Spatial Fixes,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2019): 575–83.

2 Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Denkpause für Globalgeschichte,” Merkur 855 (2020): 79–86.

3 See David Motadel’s introduction to the present special issue, “Globalizing Europe: Global History after the Global Turn,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 76, no. 4 (2021): doi:10.1017/ahsse.2022.2.

4 “The absence of the label ‘global history’ until very recently hardly signifies that the question was not posed.” See Guillaume Carnino and Jérôme Lamy, interview with Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, “‘L’histoire des techniques a longtemps été la discipline la plus simplificatrice,” Zilsel 5, no. 1 (2019): 229–67, here p. 259.

5 Rafael Dobado-González, Alfredo García-Hiernaux, and David E. Guerrero, “The Integration of Grain Markets in the Eighteenth Century: Early Rise of Globalization in the West,” Journal of Economic History 72, no. 3 (2012): 671–707.

6 See, for example, the many papers presented at “Opening Markets: Trade and Commerce in the Age of Enlightenment,” Fourteenth International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies, International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), Erasmus University, Rotterdam, July 26–31, 2015.

7 Roger Deacon, “Despotic Enlightenment: Rethinking Globalization after Foucault,” in Confronting Globalization: Humanity, Justice and the Renewal of Politics, ed. Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 34–49.

8 Richard Whatmore, “The End of Enlightenment and the First Globalisation,” E-International Relations, July 16, 2020, https://www.e-ir.info/2020/07/16/the-end-of-enlightenment-and-the-first-globalisation/.

9 Gilles Havard, “Le rire des jésuites. Une archéologie du mimétisme dans la rencontre franco-amérindienne (xviie–xviiie siècle),” Annales HSS 62, no. 3 (2007): 539–73.

10 Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

11 Paul B. Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

12 Jan De Vries, “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World,” Economic History Review, n.s. 63, no. 3 (2010): 710–33.

13 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

14 Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, introduction to The French Revolution in Global Perspective, ed. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 4.

15 David A. Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 1–24; Jeremy Adelman, “What Is Global History Now?” Aeon, March 2, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment.

16 R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (1959–1964; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Jacques Godechot, Les révolutions (1770–1799) (1963; Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1986).

17 Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A Global-Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Matthias Middell, “The French Revolution in the Global World of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, ed. Alan Forrest and Matthias Middell (London: Routledge, 2016), 23–38.

18 Gänger and Osterhammel, “Denkpause für Globalgeschichte”; Annie Jourdan, “Napoleon and Europe: The Legacy of the French Revolution,” in Forrest and Middell, The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, 207–24; Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

19 For just one example, see Emma Rothschild, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). See also Pierre Singaravélou and Sylvain Venayre, eds., Histoire du Monde au xixe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2017), which proposes a vision of the nineteenth century as so many “segments of time to which we accord an internal coherence” (p. 9).

20 “Contrary to popular belief, the most impressive episode of international economic integration which the world has seen to date was not the second half of the twentieth century, but the years between 1870 and the Great War”: Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Europe and the Causes of Globalization, 1790 to 2000,” in Europe and Globalization, ed. Henryk Kierzkowski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 64–86, here p. 65. See also Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38, no. 4 (1996): 619–57, here pp. 638–48.

21 Speranta Dumitru, ed., “Les sciences sociales sont-elles nationalistes ?” special issue, Raisons politiques 54, no. 2 (2014).

22 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610.

23 Friedrich List, Système national d’économie politique [1841], trans. Henri Richelot (Paris: Capelle, 1851), 2.

24 David Todd, L’identité économique de la France, libre-échange et protectionnisme, 1814–1851 (Paris: Grasset, 2008); Stephen W. Sawyer, Adolphe Thiers. La contingence et le pouvoir (Paris: Armand Colin, 2018).

25 Adolphe Thiers, “Discours sur la loi des douanes prononcé le 15 avril 1836,” in Discours parlementaires de M. Thiers, première partie (1830–1836), ed. Antoine Calmon (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1879), vol. 3, no. 58, pp. 269–93, here p. 273.

26 Adolphe Thiers, Discours sur le régime commercial en France, prononcés à l’Assemblée nationale les 27 et 28 juin 1851 (Paris: Paulin, Lheureux & cie, 1851), 23; Speech of M. Thiers on the Commercial Policy of France and in Opposition to the Introduction of Free-Trade into France, Delivered in the National Assembly of France on the 27th of June, 1851, trans. M. De Saint-Felix (London: J. Ollivier, 1852), 14.

27 See, for example, the review article by Martin Gierl, “L’historicisation globale du monde des Lumières. De la médiatisation de l’historiographie au xviiie siècle à sa numérisation aujourd’hui,” Dix-huitième siècle 46, no. 1 (2014): 203–18, here p. 207. Discussing J. G. A. Pocock’s study of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), Gierl describes how, “alongside Gibbon’s Rome as a metaphor of culture and power, Pocock deploys the political and ideological space of the contemporary global understanding of history and culture. The eighteenth century’s historicization of consciousness via the inscription of local historicity into a global history of the world and of culture is discernible in Gibbon and his reception of pre-Enlightenment and extra-European worlds, and it can be documented through local studies, partial studies, and analyses of different types of sources.”

28 Jules Michelet, “Préface de 1869,” Histoire de France (1869; Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer: Éditions des Équateurs, 2013), 7.

29 Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle (Paris: Hachette, 1831), 1.

30 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society [1767], ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1755). See also the European Research Project ENGLOBE, “Enlightenment and Global History” (2009–2013, Potsdam University), which argues that the Enlightenment “was the first moment in history when questions and problems arising out of globalization processes became an issue,” https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/238285.

31 Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, vol. 4, La philosophie sociale et les conclusions générales (Paris: Bachelier, 1839), 4:72.

32 Honoré de Balzac, “Avant-propos de la Comédie humaine,” in La comédie humaine, vol. 1 (1842; Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 7–20, here p. 9.

33 Thierry Lentz, “Napoléon est le précurseur de la construction européenne,” in Napoléon (Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu, 2001), 23–27.

34 On the process of social statification see, in particular, Emmanuel Fureix and François Jarrige, La modernité désenchantée. Relire l’histoire du xixe siècle français (Paris: La Découverte, 2017).

35 See the texts collected in Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville’s Writings on Slavery and Empire, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

36 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1840], ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), note 1025. This English version is based on the manuscript held at Yale University; the phrase is strangely absent from the standard French edition of de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (Paris: Gallimard/La Pléiade, 1992), 1128–29, note 1139.

37 Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce.