Global History: An Attempt at Conceptualisation

This essay aims to reconstruct the epistemological and ethical-political premises, as well as the most essential categorial core, of a conceptualisation of the “global past” as a legitimate subject of specialized scientific research that has emerged over the last four decades in the thought and practice of several groups of professional historians, in the context of the concomitant revival and renewal of World History. Subscribing to one form or another of pluralist cosmopolitanism, these scholars regard it as their professional duty to produce a genealogy of the globalized present centred on the long-term dynamic interactions and connections between major regional civilizations and on the morphological changes undergone through the centuries and millennia by the multicultural “human community” shaped by civilisational encounters culminating in contemporary “pammixia”. While indebted to earlier twentieth-century attempts to ground hopes for a future ecumenical society in a universally shared common past, the new global historians have clearly distanced themselves from their predecessors’ more or less explicit holistic and teleological assumptions. Instead, they emphasise the persistence of Eurasian polycentrism even during the epoch of Western expansion and ascendancy, the hybrid character of its cultural legacy to the present, and the vast range of opportunities for mutual accommodation that these global interactions have bequeathed to the identity groups destined to coexist and compete in the today’s hyperconnected world.