Writing the History of the Global (Paperback)

Paperback. The early part of the twenty-first century has witnessed a profound turn in history writing and museum culture towards global and world history. Historians and curators are rapidly changing what they do: no longer satisfied with traditional national histories and area studies, they are pursuing histories of subjects affected by environmental change, migration, slavery, trade and travel. They face challenges of writing about individuals and families in the world, andof political cultures and ideas that have transformed as they have moved between different regions of the world. They are 'going beyond borders' and pursuing wider concepts of connectedness and ofcosmopolitanism as these have developed in social theory. Where has all this come from, and where is it taking us as historians? Writing The History of the Global brings together a number of the major historians now entering the field and re-thinking the way they write their histories. We read the reflections of China experts, historians of India and Japan, of Latin America, Africa and Europe on their past writing, and the new directions in which global history is takingthem. It shows the rapid advances in the field from early and inspiring accounts of encounters between East and West, of the wealth and poverty of nations and the crisis of empires, to new thinking onglobal material cultures, on composite zones and East Asian development paths.It presents historians at a crossroads: enjoying the great excitement of moving out of national borders and reconnecting parts of the world once studied separately, but also facing the huge challenge of new methodologies of comparison, collaboration and interdisciplinarity and the problems of rapidly disappearing tools of foreign languages. How do we write about the history of a place, a person, an event or an idea in its context in the world? How do we do history in the current age of globalization? In this book historians engage in new dialogues outside their former specialisms to face new challenges of comparative and connective histories. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…