Reconceptualizing the Expansion of Europe (https://www.academia.edu/66167907/Reconceptualizing_the_Expansion_of_Europe)

One of the chief sources of the international revival of world history, which has been going on for about thirty years, must certainly be seen in the reconceptualization in a policentric key that has in­ vested, in the same period, the field of studies dealing with “The Expansion of Europe”. Focusing first on the founding fathers of the Cambridge School of imperial history – John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson –, then on the innovative work of their today’s heirs, this essay outlines a synthetic profile of this historiographical and academical tradition. It aims to show how the most recent developments of the expansionist paradigm, as represented by John Darwin’s book After Tamerlane (2007), can provide a way out from the false alternative in which present debates about the role of Europe in the history of the modern and contemporary world often risk to become entangled – i.e. the polemi­cal demand of “provincializing Europe” and the uncritical re-­proposal, in reaction to the radical assault against Eurocentrism, of a European centrality which is undoubtedly in need of a profound rethinking.