The chapter discusses how questions of time and temporality shape and challenge global history, as well as historical studies in general. I take my cue from the specific temporality of global history itself and its role in defining the identity of the field. I move on to show, firstly, why time can be understood as history’s ‘last fetish’, as Chris Lorenz has phrased it, and how this makes itself known among global historians. In a second step, politics of periodisation are analysed as a particular challenge for de-centring history. Here, the recent debate about the ‘Global Middle Ages’ and the longer history of the global proliferation of the ‘medieval’ serve as an example. Finally, I turn to the question of synchronisation and contemporaneity, which presents both a promise and a problem for global historians.

The chapter ‘Concepts in Greek Mathematics’ by Reviel Netz problematises a set of assumptions commonly encountered in the literature on Greek mathematics, which typically derive from a supposedly objective, a-historical conception of mathematical theory and practice. In sharp opposition to that tradition, Netz raises the possibility that the purpose of engaging with mathematical concepts may have been different in antiquity than what it has been taken to be. He asks central questions afresh, for instance: why do mathematical texts begin with definitions, and what is the purpose of mathematical definitions and of axioms. In connection to these issues, he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy, between engaging with mathematical concepts and philosophical thinking. He also advances the thesis that the relations between mathematics and philosophy changed through the various eras of antiquity, as did mathematical concepts and the role of mathematical definitions. We should seriously entertain the idea that even mathematical concepts need to be viewed within a given historical and cultural context.

The Introduction defines debt as a financial tool and as a theological concept, summarizing the role of debt in the late medieval English economy and in the sacrament of penance. This dual definition challenges the “separate spheres” interpretive paradigm that dominates literary history. A paradigm in which economics and theology are constitutive of two ideally separate modes, this dominant interpretive approach frames the shift from feudalism to capitalism as a shift from the traditional bonds of hierarchy and communalism to modern individualism and competitive acquisition. Understanding capitalism as an economy of debt makes possible a new perspective on economic change in late medieval England, one that revises Weber’s spirit of capitalism and challenges Weberian periodisation. The image of God as a bookkeeper and the concomitant understanding of sin as a debt that cannot be fully discharged is first elaborated and disseminated en masse in the late medieval flowering of vernacular literature in England and in Europe. This, I argue, is the cultural site where the systematization of the ethical conduct of life is imagined for the first time not only as a possibility for all people, but as a requirement.

I introduce this volume of the New Cambridge History of Japan with two questions: How is it that Anglophone scholars have come to refer to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and immediately surrounding years as Japan’s “early modern” period? And does calling the period early modern suggest something fundamentally different from the term used in Japanese, kinsei? When the first Cambridge History of Japan was published, in 1991, the answer to the latter question was yes: the kinsei of “the Japanese” was “more feudal than modern,” whereas the early modernity of “Western historians” was “more modern than feudal.” As this introduction demonstrates, however, the term kinsei has nothing to do with feudalism. The evolution of the terms of periodization used to refer to the Tokugawa era tell us something important about the global history of conceptualizing historical time, particularly the surprising career of modernity.

In 1274, a monk by the name of Primat from the Parisian monastery of Saint-Denis completed his magnum opus, a chronicle in Old French titled the Roman des rois. As its name suggests, this composition dealt with Frankish and French history from the perspective of its kings. It worked its way from the Franks’ earliest origins in ancient Troy, through three royal dynasties, concluding with the reign of the great Capetian monarch, Philip Augustus (d. 1223).

Dynastic periodization has traditionally structured the chronological ordering of China’s history. The period from 900 to 1350 encompasses two major dynasties, Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1367). Historians in China and elsewhere typically saw the Song as culturally vibrant and militarily weak, and the Yuan as a conquest dynasty that briefly interrupted the narrative flow of Chinese history until the restoration of “native” rule in the following Ming (1368–1644). Twentieth-century national politics recast China’s history along a linear (ancient, medieval, modern) timeline rather than a dynastic cyclical one, placing the Song and Yuan in a medieval-to-modern transition. The high degree of commercialization and monetization of the Song economy led scholars to view the Song as experiencing an economic transformation that fostered dramatic changes in Song society. Recent interest in cultural diversity as well as political concerns with the role of minority peoples – in both the People’s Republic of China and elsewhere – have drawn new attention to the Khitan Liao, Tangut Xi Xia, and Jurchen Jin empires that rose on the Song borders, as well as the Mongol conquest and rule of China as the Yuan dynasty. Middle-period China encompasses processes of political unification, social and economic transformations, and profound cultural achievements.

The conclusion reviews the period and themes covered in the book. Different kinds of time played out in different sectors. Clothing reflects this temporal and spatial diversity. Viewed from the perspective of what people wore, however, this was the time of the Mao suit, or at least of the zhifu. Not everyone wore one; there were periods of light and shade in the intensity of dress conformity; there were differences between town and country, between male and female, even between decades. Throughout this period, however, zhifu had hegemonic status. In 1983, even as the Western suit was surging back into fashion, the Zhongshan suit was promoted as the ‘representative garment’ of men’s clothing in China, a garment that encapsulated national feeling, expressed the style of the Chinese people, and was also admired and loved by them.

This chapter argues for an integration of American theater produced across generic and institutional lines during the postwar decades into our understanding of theatrical modernism. It models thinking about theater across traditional divisions of textual drama from non-textual performance, Broadway from Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the avant-garde work of the 1960s from what preceded it. Theater in the midcentury was drawn toward both medial specificity and the strategic incorporation of other media, particularly film, and accordingly deployed two key formal strategies: improvisation and citation. Although important to theater in diverse ways before modernism, these became widespread, self-conscious tactics of postwar theater across generic lines, and expanded and developed over the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter closes with a reading of The Living Theatre’s 1959 production of The Connection as an exemplary case study.

The epilogue reflects on some of the implications of the localized nature of the study and the historicism it practices. It questions the period boundary between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature as well as the too easy application of the term metaphysical to a disparate set of writers. In the process, it argues for an awareness of the distances that texts traveled as they influenced other writers and an openness to adopting a wider, more transnational, sense of literary connections and networks.

Eventful analysis employs the most unfrozen and hence the most exploratory strand of CHA. It employs historical comparisons and explores transformation patterns, that is, patterns of qualitative change. It uses two key tools: historical description and conceptualization. The aim of historical description is to figure out what is going on, to gain a basic understand of a phenomenon before proceeding to explain it. Often this involves de-redescribing a phenomena that has qualitatively changed over time. Historical description, in turn, involves six concrete steps: fact gathering, chronicling, concatenation, periodizing, looking for intercurrence patterns, and rethinking research questions. Conceptualization serves to make historical description more comparativist and to explore broader patterns. The chapter discusses how to replace proper names with broader concepts by defining both the positive and the negative pole of concepts. It lists criteria for assessing the content and temporcal validity of concepts.

This introductory chapter presents the book’s themes and contents, taking up the topic of how we define the Roman Middle Republican period. While the periodization to which “Middle” Republic pertains is wholly modern, the essays in this book argue for a discrete unit of historical inquiry. Our “Middle Republican” period was transformative for the societies of Rome and Italy, while its full dynamism is best captured through an expansive and capacious approach embodied by this collection of chapters.

When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.

This chapter is an introduction, addressing some preliminary issues: (a) the readership of this book; (b) the long history of the Chinese language as a natural laboratory in testing hypotheses in linguistics, human cognition, and civilization; (c) the periodization of the Chinese language; (d) the selection of historical texts; and (e) the structure of this book.

Presents a history of the theatre closures of 1642, describing its effects on the production, reception, and conceptions of drama across the eighteen-year prohibition and tracing its influence in modern dramatic criticism. The Introduction unpacks the pervasive metaphor of the "death" of theatre after 1642, and the understanding of playbooks as the treasured remains of a theatrical culture now extinct. Demonstrates how the theatrical prohibition spurred theatrical nostalgia, print publication, and play reading, all crucial factors in English drama’s acquisition of a literary status. Takes the reader on an imaginary walking tour around London during the theatrical prohibition, attending to signs of theatre’s demise and printed drama’s endurance. Describes the emergence of three printed dramatic forms in the 1650s: the serial play collection, the all-drama commonplace book, and comprehensive catalogues of English printed drama, texts in which we see an emerging sense of what we now call “early modern drama” as a coherent genre and critical field. Demonstrates that the pre-1642 period came to be understood as a distinct cultural moment (the “last age”) associated with a discrete collection of plays (“old plays”), arguing that this conception paved the way for a coherent system of critical study and disciplinary analysis.

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) and Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) shared an interest in late medieval Burgundian art. My essay reads Auerbach’s famous Mimesis (1946) as addressing one of Huizinga’s most pressing concerns, namely periodization, not only as he articulated them in Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), but also as they dominated several of his (Huizinga’s) less well-known texts on the Renaissance that challenged the Burckhardt-inflected way both periods were understood at the time. Auerbach’s reception of Huizinga’s understanding in Autumn of late medieval realism in particular in a series of texts beginning in 1921 and running up through 1946 rattled at the foundation of the assumption that periodization was a relevant way of looking at cultural history at all. The alternative represented by his Mimesis focuses, rather, on what Auerbach describes in the “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (1954) as the “existential realism” he finds in texts from across the ages.

Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.