In 2010, the historian Denis Crouzet discovered a remarkable unpublished manuscript inside a dusty suitcase in the storeroom of a sixth-floor fin-de-siècle Paris apartment. Written in 1950, under the impression of the horrors of the Second World War, by two of France’s greatest historians of the twentieth century, Lucien Febvre, patron of the Annales school and professor at the Collège de France, and his junior colleague François Crouzet, a scholar of economic history at the Sorbonne (and Denis Crouzet’s father), it challenged the established narratives of national (and European) history. Entitled Origines internationales d’une civilisation: Éléments d’une histoire de France, the book offered a breathtaking survey of centuries of global influences on the Hexagon.Footnote 1
First, its authors looked at the country’s inhabitants. Dismissing the idea of a “pure race,” they argued that the French had always been a mixture of peoples, including Turks, Arabs, and Africans. The same was true for France’s flora and fauna. The trees considered to be the most French, they explained, came from Asia: The plane tree was imported in the sixteenth century, the chestnut arrived in the early seventeenth, the cedar had not put down roots in the country before the end of the eighteenth, and so on. Next, they turned to cuisine, reminding their readers that some of the most classic French foods originated abroad: oranges, mandarins, and lemons from the Far East; tomatoes and potatoes from America; coffee from Africa. Not even the tobacco in Gauloises was French. In a sweeping tour de force, they demonstrated that the history of France was one of constant “borrowings” from all parts of the world, with these adoptions, adaptations, and appropriations making the French the “heirs” of diverse pasts.Footnote 2
The book had been commissioned by the newly created, Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to overcome the narrow narratives of national and European history. By providing an example of a more open history, showing how much every country and continent owed to the outside world, some functionaries in the organization wished to encourage “international understanding.”Footnote 3 Their hope that this example would prompt historians of other countries to engage in similar work remained unfulfilled. The publication was blocked by those in the organization who considered it an assault on the idea of the nation and Europe’s global supremacy. Rejected by UNESCO, the manuscript was abandoned by its authors.Footnote 4 It was only published sixty years later, in 2012, following its rediscovery in Crouzet’s suitcase.
Times have changed. But even today, as they continue to write local-, nation-, and continent-centered histories, some scholars of the European past still feel uneasy about attempts to open up the continent’s history. This became most evident in 2017, when a group of historians around Patrick Boucheron, following in the footsteps of Febvre and Crouzet, produced an 800-page Histoire mondiale de la France, seeking to understand French history as a dimension of global history.Footnote 5 In the ensuing controversy, Pierre Nora rejected the work as “the end of common truth,” while Alain Finkielkraut declared its authors the “gravediggers of the great French heritage.”Footnote 6 Denouncing it as an attempt to destroy France’s “national narrative” (roman national), the country’s conservative enfant terrible Éric Zemmour went as far as to speak of “the war of history.”Footnote 7 A bestseller was born. “After several decades of somnolence, academic history is a hit,” commented Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books.Footnote 8 A similar volume, Storia mondiale dell’Italia, was published shortly after in Italy.Footnote 9 Dutch, Spanish, Sicilian, Flemish, and Catalan equivalents followed within a year, German, Portuguese, and Hungarian versions a bit later.Footnote 10 And yet such works are still the exception.Footnote 11
Although European history is one of the vastest fields of historical scholarship, encompassing research on local, national, regional, and continental spaces, the continent’s global entanglements have long remained marginalized.Footnote 12 This is particularly true for national history, so closely connected with the birth of history as an academic discipline, which remains the dominant approach to European history. The classic surveys in the field, from Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s history of Germany to Christophe Charle’s history of France, present their nations as almost hermetically closed spaces.Footnote 13 Popular national histories, such as Robert Tombs’s The English and Their History (2014), which consciously aim to uphold the notion of historically closed national communities in the public imagination, continue to top our bestseller lists.Footnote 14
European continental history, which as a genre of historical writing originated in the early modern period, has traditionally been no more open.Footnote 15 Classical histories of Europe often presented self-asserting grand narratives of Western civilization reaching back to antiquity.Footnote 16 In the twentieth century, particularly in the aftermath of the world wars, scholars eager to overcome nationalism made copious efforts to create European histories that would reconcile Europeans.Footnote 17 Toward the end of the century, as European integration accelerated, an unprecedented number of books (and new journals) appeared which aimed to Europeanize the continent’s national histories.Footnote 18 These new histories highlighted similarities and differences using comparative approaches, as well as transnational connections.Footnote 19 And yet, despite these efforts, European history writing remained fixated on the nation-state. Equally problematic, some European histories have overcome the national only to revive, consciously or unconsciously, older civilizational narratives of the “West,” the “Occident,” or even “Christendom.” Most strikingly, general works of European history are often remarkably inward-looking.
None of the major surveys of modern European continental history on our course reading lists – including the magna opera by Mark Mazower, Tony Judt, and Ian Kershaw – consider global entanglements seriously.Footnote 20 Most of these works tend to treat the continent as a closed historical space, almost completely ignoring exchanges of goods, people, and ideas with the outside world. Even Eric Hobsbawm’s classic history of the modern age concentrates on Europe and America while showing little interest in these regions’ (nonimperial) global connections.Footnote 21 If these works consider the world at all, they focus on Europe’s global impact rather than global influences on Europe itself.
The rise of global history over recent years has affected almost every field of historical study. Historians of Europe, however, have seldom played a central role in these debates. The major works in the field have been written by historians of the non-European world – Jürgen Osterhammel, a scholar of modern China, Christopher Bayly, a scholar of modern India, and so on.Footnote 22 Some see global history by definition as non-European history. Indeed, certain advocates of the global turn, determined to decenter world history from Europe, have been quite critical of the intellectual dominance of the field of European history. At the same time, some Europeanists have reacted defensively to the global turn. Anxious about the marginalization of their field both intellectually and professionally (e.g., in departmental battles over new faculty hires), they consider calls to provincialize Europe a threat.
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Yet European and global history do not, of course, contradict each other. Global history should not only be defined by the geographical location of its subject. Its aim should not be to examine far-flung regions, as distant from Europe as possible. Instead, global history provides a conceptual approach, namely the study of global interrelations as well as parallel and divergent developments and transformations in different parts of the world. For us Europeanists, the global turn is not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity – an opportunity to open up modern European history, to look at the history of modern Europe as part of the history of a globalizing world, to globalize modern European history. Indeed, one of the most significant developments in our field at the moment is the attempt to interweave European and world history. This will ultimately help us to look at European history from entirely new angles – and to redefine the field.
In concrete terms, global history opens various new avenues of research for scholars of European (urban, local, national, regional, and continental) history. First, it allows us to see similarities and differences (as well as convergences and divergences over time) through comparison between historical phenomena in different parts of the world, and to contextualize developments in Europe globally.Footnote 23 This also means that we need to rethink assumptions about European uniqueness.Footnote 24 Where, in the past, historians of Europe have tended to use global comparisons selectively to underline the continent’s alleged historical singularity (and indeed superiority), we now need to pay attention to both differences and similarities.Footnote 25 Second, global history allows us to explore Europe’s direct and indirect connections with the wider world.Footnote 26 This also means that we need to question traditional historical narratives, which have almost exclusively focused on a one-way diffusion from a European center to a non-European periphery (Europeanization, Westernization, and, more universally, modernization), an approach which all too often assumes European superiority and reduces the non-European regions of the world to mere imitators.Footnote 27 The continent has always been not only an engine but also a product of global transformations.
The contributions to this book discuss how European history can be integrated into global history. This introductory chapter examines the ways in which historians of Europe have responded to the “global turn,” providing a broad historiographical overview. It also demonstrates that individual scholars have shown an increasing interest in Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. Although their studies remain often disconnected (and have not yet fully entered the historiographical canon), taken together they may reshape our understanding of European history.
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In terms of physical borders, it is practically impossible to draw clear lines between Europe and the outside world. The continent’s natural boundaries are indistinct and in all cases highly permeable. As early as 1949, Fernand Braudel described the Mediterranean as a space of exchange, not a strict continental barrier, noting that “from the Black Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean’s northern waters wash the shores of Europe. Here again, if he wants to establish boundaries, the historian will have more hesitation than the geographer.”Footnote 28 Scholars of Atlantic history and, to a lesser extent, historians of Europe’s northern shores have explored similar connections.Footnote 29 Their studies have shown that these oceans can hardly be seen as boundaries but instead constitute spaces in which all seaboards form integral parts. Even scholars of Europe’s eastern and southeastern borderlands have pointed to the close-knit routes of exchange across borders.Footnote 30 In terms of climate history, too, as Sam White has shown, it is virtually impossible to divide the Balkans from Asia Minor.Footnote 31 Indeed, the division between Europe and Asia seems particularly arbitrary; topographically, Europe is “a western peninsula of Asia,” as Alexander von Humboldt once observed.Footnote 32
The physical geographic concept of Europe has therefore, unsurprisingly, changed throughout history. There have been age-old controversies over whether Russia is part of the continent or not; most now consider the Ural Mountains as the border between Asia and Europe, following the eighteenth-century Swedish cartographer Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg.Footnote 33 Still, Leopold von Ranke famously claimed that “New York and Lima” were closer to “us” than “Kiev and Smolensk.”Footnote 34 The nineteenth-century Prussian geographer August Rühle von Lilienstern suggested including North Africa and the lands to the Indus, Amu, Tobol, and Ob in Europe.Footnote 35 The German historian Karl Krüger in the 1950s argued that North Africa and the Middle East were part of a “greater Europe,” united by the Mediterranean as a Hellenistic-European cultural space.Footnote 36 The British scholar Oscar Halecki, in contrast, claimed that the Ottoman Empire was not part of Europe because of its Islamic-majority population, whereas Russia, with its Christian majority, had been part of Europe up until the Bolshevik Revolution.Footnote 37
Too difficult to demarcate physically, Europe was often defined abstractly, as a sociocultural space.Footnote 38 “Europe,” Peter Burke observed, “is not so much a place as an idea.”Footnote 39 Europe, as Jürgen Kocka has argued, is a construct of our minds.Footnote 40 This is not the place to discuss the different traits that have been ascribed to this space, though it is noteworthy that Europe has routinely been defined in relation to an exterior Other, often the “Orient,” usually portrayed as inferior.Footnote 41 “The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings,” John Stuart Mill once remarked.Footnote 42 “If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.” “Marathon was the birth cry of Europe,” commented a certain General Fuller a hundred years later.Footnote 43 Outside Europe, particularly in the colonial and postcolonial world, images of Europe could be quite different, of course. (It is worth noting here that, even though non-European conceptions of Europe also varied, across many parts of the world, similar terms emerged to designate the continent – Frenk in the Ottoman Empire, farangi in Iran and Afghanistan, färänji in Ethiopia, farang in Thailand, and barang in Cambodia – as a geographical space and, and more importantly, as an idea.) In the end, sociocultural notions of Europe have been just as contested as physical ones. “Numerous attempts to define the cultural or social peculiarities of Europe suffer from the juxtaposition of such phantoms and from the untested claim that salient European virtues are absent in other parts of the world,” Osterhammel observed.Footnote 44 “In the worst case,” he added, “the clichés about Europe itself are no less crude than those about Indian or Chinese society.” Homo europeaeus never existed.Footnote 45 And in any case, however we define Europe, there are always links transcending its borders, influencing its local, national, regional, and continental spaces. Acknowledging the changing conceptions of the continent’s borders, Norman Davies spoke about a “tidal Europe.”Footnote 46 A. J. P. Taylor concluded that “European history is whatever the historian wants it to be.”Footnote 47
From the perspective of environmental history, flora and fauna from far-flung continents have always impacted Europe’s natural life. These influences could also be directly connected to Europe’s imperial enterprise.Footnote 48 This became most obvious in places such as London’s Kew Gardens, a global microcosm of nature and empire, examined in Richard Drayton’s Nature’s Government (2000).Footnote 49 Germs, too, have never known borders.Footnote 50 The Asiatic cholera came to Europe from Bengal along trade routes after the British conquest of North India. Later outbreaks, studied in Richard J. Evans’s work on the Hamburg cholera epidemic, spread from India via Persia and Russia to western Europe.Footnote 51 “Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe,” Robert Koch remarked to his colleagues at the time, expressing not only a sentiment of European civilizational superiority but also a sense of global interconnectedness.Footnote 52 The same is true for Europe’s ecological crises, as, for example, experienced in 1816, the “year without a summer,” after an eruption of the Mount Tambora volcano near Java in 1815 blocked solar energy and cooled the climate globally, leading to crop failures and Europe’s last subsistence crisis.Footnote 53
Human mobility, too, has changed Europe’s population over the centuries. A fast-growing literature on migrations and minorities in European history traces these movements, ranging from African settlers in the Renaissance to twentieth-century postcolonial and labor migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.Footnote 54 There is now a substantial body of studies on the history of Afropeans, for example.Footnote 55 Giants of European literature such as Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas had part-African ancestry. Black musicians, as we know from the work of Kira Thurman, performed in the greatest concert halls of German-speaking central Europe throughout the twentieth century, complicating their audiences’ understanding of Austro-German classical musical culture.Footnote 56 As global mobility accelerated, the continent’s population became more diverse. Empire, of course, is an important part of this history. At the same time, Europeans, too, spread across the globe, building vast settler communities.Footnote 57 Their stories show, as demonstrated in David Blackbourn’s magnificent Germany in the World, that the histories of European peoples cannot just be told as if they solely took place within their countries’ European geographic boundaries.Footnote 58 Global family and community networks connected these European migrants to their home countries in Europe, just as non-European migrant groups in Europe maintained links beyond the continent’s borders. Heightened mobility was accompanied by the creation of new mechanisms to bureaucratically control movement across borders, whether national or, more recently, European, with passports, identity cards, and visas. Ultimately, encounters with “foreigners” both overseas and at home would shape the ways in which Europeans saw themselves and mapped the world’s populations. Some non-Europeans were put on display (and studied) in Imperial Europe’s human zoos.Footnote 59 A large body of research now stresses the importance of colonial environments in the history of modern racist theories, theories which, in turn, directly influenced human interactions in Europe and the wider world.Footnote 60 To claim, as one historian has done, that racism did not shape thought in an imperial hub such as mid-Victorian Britain is odd.Footnote 61 As global mobility accelerated, Europeans increasingly tried to segregate humans inside and outside Europe according to their racial categorizations.
Historians have also long pointed out that modern Europe’s economy can only be fully understood in its global context. One of the most prominent examples is the Industrial Revolution, which, as Hobsbawm argued in Industry and Empire as early as 1968, was directly connected to European imperialism.Footnote 62 Similarly, Europe’s major economic crises, from the crash of tulipmania to the Great Depression, originated beyond its borders.Footnote 63 Modern Europe has always been integrated into the global economy, shaped by the movement of raw materials, goods, and labor – albeit unevenly and to different degrees at different times. Today, many decades after the publication of Eric Williams’s pioneering Capitalism and Slavery (1944), historians are still debating the connection between the global slave trade and the rise of European capitalism.Footnote 64 The global commodity trade, from cotton, silver, and gold to sugar, salt, and oil, had a dramatic impact on Europe, as shown by a rapidly growing body of literature.Footnote 65 Global trade, Maxine Berg has demonstrated, transformed Europe’s market for luxury goods.Footnote 66 Fashions, from turquerie to chinoiserie to japonaiserie, were globally inspired. A particularly fascinating study on the subject is Sarah Stein’s work on African ostrich feathers, which decorated the hats of Europe’s bourgeois ladies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 67 Cacao, as William Clarence-Smith, Marcy Norton, and others have shown, had been shipped since the seventeenth century from the Americas to Europe, where consumers quickly developed a taste for it.Footnote 68 The same holds true for tobacco, coffee, and tea, all of which transformed European consumption cultures.Footnote 69 Worldwide commodity trade shaped fashion, interior design, and culinary taste even in the remotest corners of the continent.
Modern Europe’s global political relations have been comparatively well studied, although most of the literature on the subject deals with imperialism. Older generations of historians were often quick to explain Europe’s global imperial hegemony as a result of the continent’s inherent qualities, a “European miracle,” as Eric L. Jones put it.Footnote 70 The story may not be so simple. Some scholars have pointed out that it was non-European political crises and subsequent colonial exploitation that enabled Europe’s rise and imperial expansion.Footnote 71 And imperialism was, of course, never a one-way exchange but impacted Europe almost as much as the colonial world, if in very different ways. Some, most notably Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, have even suggested that Europe’s imperial powers and their overseas possessions should be considered a contiguous space without a clear center.Footnote 72 Works on anti-colonial radicals in European metropolises, such as Michael Goebel’s Anti-Imperial Metropolis (2015), have shown that struggles between colonizers and colonized could take place at the very heart of Europe.Footnote 73
And imperialism was not the only form of modern Europe’s global power relations. In the heyday of empire, European governments had multifaceted relations with independent states of the non-European world – China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam. Europe’s nobility was part of a global aristocratic caste, most spectacularly displayed during visits of Persian, Siamese, and Ottoman royalty to European capitals.Footnote 74 After decolonization, twentieth-century Europe’s political entanglements with the wider world became even more multifaceted. Today, the European Union includes territories as far away as Martinique in the Caribbean and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.Footnote 75
Yet internal European politics was also continuously shaped by the world. The history of the emergence of Europe’s liberal and democratic movements cannot be written without taking into account the Atlantic world, as has been explored by scholars since R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot.Footnote 76 Nationalism, too, was often deeply influenced by global encounters, a process described to great effect in Sebastian Conrad’s Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (2006).Footnote 77 The movements in western Europe that culminated in the events of 1968 drew on the ideas of distant revolutionary thinkers such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara.Footnote 78 Modern ideologies (even if predominantly studied within national and at times European frameworks) spanned the globe.Footnote 79 The dualist distinction between pure European ideologies – liberalism, communism, fascism, and so on – and their unpure variants outside Europe, where there are no more than a “derivative discourse,” ignores the global environment in which they emerged and evolved.Footnote 80 Moreover, global comparative history has also put political developments in Europe into perspective. Europe’s great revolutions, for example, were almost all part of global revolutionary moments – 1789, 1848, 1917, 1989, and so on.Footnote 81
Finally, transcontinental entanglements were equally important in shaping social and cultural life in many parts of Europe. This is most evident in the history of the emergence of modern class structures. The rise of Europe’s middle classes and bourgeois cultures was profoundly shaped by global transformations, as discussed in The Global Bourgeoisie (2019).Footnote 82 The same can be said for other social groups, from the working classes to the aristocracy. European cultures, like all cultures, developed through complex processes of appropriation, adaptation, and hybridization. Western, northern, eastern, and southern Europe’s cultural landscapes were profoundly shaped by the colonial world, as Catherine Hall, Andrew Thompson, David Ciarlo, and others have shown.Footnote 83 Similarly, the history of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, as explored in Elizabeth Buettner’s Europe after Empire (2016), is impossible to write without taking into account postcolonial cultural influences.Footnote 84 Even the history of gender relations and sexuality in Europe, as traced by Todd Shepard, is inextricably connected to their postcolonial environments.Footnote 85 To be sure, global influences on Europe’s social and cultural life went beyond empire. The continent’s high culture in particular has always been shaped from the outside. Jack Goody famously argued that Europe’s Renaissance owed much to the Arab, Indian, and Chinese renaissances.Footnote 86 Similarly, any history of Europe’s Enlightenment will be incomplete without consideration of the global context in which it evolved.Footnote 87 European scholars were increasingly part of a global republic of letters stretching from Harvard to Kolkata and beyond.Footnote 88 Some of the continent’s greatest twentieth-century thinkers had biographies that linked them to lands beyond Europe – Thomas Mann to his Brazilian ancestry, George Orwell to his birthplace in India, and so on. Fernand Braudel’s history, Albert Camus’s philosophy, Pierre Bourdieu’s anthropology, Jacques Derrida’s linguistics, and Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture all were influenced by their creators’ ties to Algeria.Footnote 89 Even more marked was the world’s impact on Europe’s popular cultures. The most important twentieth-century example is cultural Americanization, from jazz in the interwar years to postwar Hollywood, so forcefully described in Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire (2005).Footnote 90 Europe’s body cultures were shaped by outside influences; just consider the twentieth-century history of the rise of Europe’s Brazilian waxing salons.Footnote 91 Historians have also shown an increasing interest in the global influences on European culinary culture, from Indian curries to Turkish kebabs.Footnote 92 Likewise, Europe’s religious landscapes have for centuries been influenced by global exchange. In western Europe, Muslim communities became institutionalized in the early twentieth century.Footnote 93 Buddhist, Sikh, and other groups followed. Spiritualism, as brilliantly shown in Ruth Harris’s work, was a global phenomenon.Footnote 94 Most importantly perhaps, modern Europe’s public sphere, which emerged in the eighteenth century and soon reached even the smallest village, became global.Footnote 95
Taken together, this growing literature, although still fragmented, compellingly demonstrates that Europe has always been an arena of transcontinental interactions, as much a recipient of outside influences as a force transforming the world. To be sure, its interconnections with the world were never static but changed over time. Their impact was uneven, affecting some parts of the continent, such as port cities, university towns, and capitals, more (and in different ways) than others.
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Apart from allowing us to see Europe’s deep entanglements with the wider world, global history forces us to rethink our epistemological parameters when studying the continent’s history. It prompts us to question some of the major concepts of modern European history, such as class, nation, revolution, public and private, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization. And it enables us to critically reflect on some of our field’s fundamental paradigms – most prominently, perhaps, modernity – and periodizations. It forces us to question the universality of our analytic weights and measures. Noting that the categories of European history are neither objective nor universal, Dipesh Chakrabarty and his disciples have compellingly warned against imposing them on the history of the non-European world.Footnote 96 No doubt, such categories offer lenses that can distort as much as they allow us to see. What is more, they impose European standards on the world, making non-European history appear to be deficient. Some have even questioned whether societies around the world share the most basic cognitive ground, an assumption made by those who use European concepts to study the world.
Yet radical relativism cannot be the answer, as Chakrabarty himself has acknowledged. There is a tension between the need to sufficiently consider the uniqueness of every smaller geographic space we study and the need to have some basic (ecumenical) consensus on major historical concepts when writing world history.Footnote 97 Besides, it is not unproblematic to brand all concepts of modernity, from urbanization to secularization, as European (or Western), as to do so assumes that these phenomena are essentially European when in fact they often were not: They were neither embraced universally in all parts of Europe (which we should be careful not to essentialize), nor completely absent in other parts of the world, and were themselves shaped by global entanglements. These debates can help historians of modern Europe be more critical when using allegedly universal concepts, paradigms, and periodizations. At the same time, when studying European history, and particularly the history of Europe’s global connections, we may find it useful to adopt concepts developed in the field of world history that stress hybridity, syncretism, and interconnectedness.
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Overall, the growing body of literature on the global history of the continent may come to critically reshape our notion of Europe (and European history) and its boundaries. Although Europe is, as we have seen, almost impossible to define either as a physical concept or a sociocultural idea, historians all too often treat it as a monolithic entity, ignoring its inherent diversity and permeability.Footnote 98 A truly global history of Europe, which takes into account not only the continent’s internal heterogeneity but also its connections to the outside world, would counter essentialist notions of Europe.
These reflections on Europe also shed light on broader questions about continents as ontological categories.Footnote 99 The concept of continents (from terra continens), commonly defined as large, continuous landmasses usually separated from one another by water, has been used to map the world since antiquity, when the threefold continental scheme of Europe, Asia, and Africa was invented. Although historians are generally cautious about the use of generalizing geographies, references to continents are, curiously, seldom questioned. Yet the division of the world into continents is hardly indisputable. In their 1997 book The Myth of Continents, Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen issued a powerful warning about the continental taxonomy: “Otherwise sophisticated and self-critical works habitually essentialize continents, adopting their boundaries as frameworks for analyzing and classifying phenomena to which they simply do not apply.”Footnote 100 “Dividing the world into a handful of fundamental units in this way may be convenient,” they noted, “but it does injustice to the complexities of global geography, and it leads to faulty comparisons.” Their critique in a way echoed the words of the German geographer Alfred Hettner, who as early as 1893 mocked those who felt enchanted “when looking from Gibraltar to Africa or from Constantinople to Asia or crossing the Urals from Europe to Asia” and who believed that “the words European, Asian, African, American, Australian” alluded to “a distinctive characteristic of land and people” in specific parts of the world.Footnote 101 This does not mean that the epistemological distinctions between continents – or, indeed, “European history” as a disciplinary category – are useless in historical research. It does mean, however, that we need to be conscious of different spatial layers that allow us to consider internal diversity and external relations.Footnote 102
Spatial categories will remain important units of analysis in historical studies.Footnote 103 We constantly, consciously or unconsciously, map the world using local and urban, national and imperial, regional and continental, and other spatial taxonomies, and at times make even simpler distinctions, be they civilizational or cultural (East and West), economic (North and South), or political (First, Second, and Third World); indeed, such broad essentialist geographies can be found at the heart of works by intellectuals as diverse as Oswald Spengler, Samuel Huntington, Niall Ferguson, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Edward Said.Footnote 104
Yet the use of spatial categories in general is not unproblematic. It is not just that they can obscure the internal heterogeneity of a discrete space and its connections to (and similarities with) the outside world. Spatial divisions all too often also conflate physical and sociocultural criteria. The spatial units we use, from the local to the continental, are usually understood to be not only coherent physical entities (physical geography) but also coherent human (cultural, social, economic, and political) entities (human geography). In reality, however, there is no necessary congruence between physical and human spaces. Human life cannot always be meaningfully divided according to physical geographies or maps. The use of spatial categories may thus mislead us into making false generalizations about the inhabitants of a particular territory. Indeed, ascribing distinctive social, cultural, political, or economic features (and histories) to the peoples living in a specific physical territory is a form of environmental determinism. Physical maps cannot simply be superimposed onto sociocultural human maps. Moreover, physical spaces are usually difficult to define along clear lines in terms of natural topography, tectonic plates, climate, or flora and fauna. Likewise, human spaces are fragile constructs created through human interaction (and imagination), which are constantly evolving and are not naturally determined. They are not given but socially created, forged through social, cultural, economic, and political practices and discourses. In any case, any geographical space we might use in our studies is no more than an abstract construct based on a mental map.Footnote 105 And finally, we must also be aware that the spatial division of the world can (and often does) imply hierarchies of and value statements about spatial units.
In short, we need to bear in mind that spatial units are imprecise categories of analysis. We also need to be mindful that physical space and human (sociocultural, economic, or political-legal) space do not necessarily correspond. Moreover, to take into account internal heterogeneity and external connections (and similarities), we must consider multiple scales when studying the past, interweaving different spaces in our analysis.Footnote 106 There is no contradiction between local, national, regional, continental, and global history, as humans almost always act in multiple spaces simultaneously. Although different spaces have varying degrees of importance depending on the topic, any serious work of historical scholarship will be multilayered, considering different spatial levels. Ultimately, spatial categories are important units of analysis, which – along with thematic and temporal concepts – will in all likelihood remain, not least for pragmatic, heuristic reasons, crucial in organizing historical knowledge (and structuring our discipline).
It seems almost impossible to write a modern world history without Europe, which has shaped global interactions over the last centuries more than any other continent. Conversely, a history of modern Europe that ignores the wider world will inevitably remain incomplete. Global history is not the tombstone of European history. It is a necessary impulse that will enrich the field and prompt us to question its most fundamental assumptions. This will mean rethinking the continent’s political, social, cultural, and economic histories from a global angle, taking into account sources in languages and archives not previously considered and transgressing history’s geographical sub-disciplines. This will ultimately help reshape our understanding of the boundaries of modern Europe – and the field of modern European history.
In the end, the idea of Europe as a closed entity has always been an illusion. Europe and the world are not as far apart as some of us might like to believe. Europa herself, after all, as any student of her mythological past will confirm, was non-European, a Phoenician beauty abducted from the shores of Asia. Europe per se was constituted from the outside. In short, it is time to deprovincialize Europe.
