Rethinking Global History

Stefanie Gänger is Professor of Modern History at the Heidelberg University. She is the author of A Singular Remedy. Cinchona Across the Atlantic World, 1751–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Jürgen Osterhammel is Professor Emeritus of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. His books in English include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014). With Akira Iriye, he is the general editor of A History of the World (6 vols., Harvard University Press, 2012–24).

• Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; 1. Introduction: rethinking history, globally Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel; Part I. Forms of Inquiry and Argumentation: 2. Explanation: the limits of narrativism in global history Jürgen Osterhammel; 3. Comparison: its use and misuse in social and economic history Alessandro Stanziani; 4. Time: temporality in global history Christina Brauner; 5. Quantification: measuring connections and comparative development in global history Pim De Zwart; Part II. Concepts and Metaphors: 6. The global and the earthy: taking the planet seriously as a global historian Sujit Sivasundaram; 7. Openness and closure: spheres and other metaphors of boundedness in global history Valeska Huber; 8. Scales: from shipworms to the globe and back Daniel Margócsy; Part III. Configurations and Telos: 9. Tacit directionality: processes, teleology, and contingency in global history Jan C. Jansen; 10. Distance: a problem in global history Jeremy Adelman; 11. Materiality: global history and the material world Stefanie Gänger; 12. Centrisms: questions of privilege and perspective in global historical scholarship Dominic Sachsenmaier.

‘In this book a group of well-known practitioners provide a multifaceted analysis of the concepts, methods, and issues that will define future scholarship in Global History. If this branch of history is here to stay, then historians should embrace the full conceptual rearmament here discussed to write histories worthy of the problems affecting today's world.’ Giorgio Riello, European University Institute and the University of Warwick