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Writing Global History and Its Challenges—A Workshop withJürgen 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 andGeoffrey Parker of Ohio State University gave an all-day workshop on globalhistory for graduate students and junior and senior scholars of the Universitiesof Dundee and St. Andrews in Scotland. The workshop consisted of threediscussion sessions, each with a different theme, namely theconceptualization(s), parameters, and possible future(s) of global history. Thecentral question was to what extent this fast-changing field requiredadjustments of “normal” historiographical methodologies andepistemologies. The workshop participants agreed that global history focuses inparticular on connections across large spaces or long timespans, or both. Yetreconstructing these webs of connections should not obscure global inequalities.In the case of empires, many of the exchanges across space and time have beenordered in a hierarchical fashion—metropoles profiting from peripheralspaces, for example—and imposed by certain groups of people on others,resulting in, for example, the enslavement or extermination of indigenouspeoples. As historians, we should also ask ourselves what we do about peoples orareas that were or remain unconnected, local, and remote. Where doesglobalization end?

Keywords

Global historyhistory of empireenvironmental historyJürgen OsterhammelGeoffrey Parker

Information

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

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Martine van Ittersum is Senior Lecturer in History at the University ofDundee. She is the author of Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius,Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the EastIndies, 1595–1615 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). She haspublished widely on the history of international law and on the theoryand practice of Western imperialism and colonialism, particularly in theearly modern period. Felicia Gottmann is the Leverhulme Early CareerResearch Fellow in History at the University of Dundee. She is theauthor of Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of EconomicLiberalism: 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 IndiaCompany and the Sultanate of Makassar.

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