Abstract
The understanding of two of the major history branches, world history and global history, with which the current wave of history writing beyond borders is identified, is punctuated by three interrelated conceptual problems. First, there is not a widely accepted distinction between the two concepts. The aims of world history, as stated by Jerry Bentley in the Journal of World History editorial, are “to transcend national frontiers, and study forces such as population movements, economic fluctuations, climatic changes, transfer of technologies,” and so on from the very beginnings of human history.1 This definition was consolidated during the first two decades of world history’s use, as reflected in Patrick Manning’s definition of it as “the study of connections between communities and between communities and their environments” in the first encompassing book on the historiography of world history.2 The editorial of the Journal of Global History mentions a “subtle difference between the closely related endeavors of global and world history” without any further specification.3 In their survey on historiography in the last 18 years, Georg Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya Mukherjee also point to the fact that it is not clear how the concepts of world history and global history differ: “The term ‘global history’ overlapped with ‘world history’ and was often identical with it, but tended to deal more frequently with the period after the explorations of the fifteenth century and often referred to the process of globalization since the last third of the twentieth century.”4
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Notes
J. Bentley, “A New Forum for Global History,” Journal of World History 1 (1990): iii–v.
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© 2015 Diego Olstein
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Olstein, D. (2015). Thinking History Globally, Thinking Globalization Historically. In: Thinking History Globally. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318145_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318145_8
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