In this essay I review four recent monographs on Chinese American history: Xiao-huang Yin's Chinese American Literature since the 1850s, Madeline Hsu's Dreaming of Gold, Dream of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, Young Chen's Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community, and Xiaojian Zhao's Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965. Based on both English- and Chinese-language sources, the authors of these four books explore migration processes and the social origins of Chinese immigrants (...) from an international perspective and they reinterpret the cultural values of immigrants as fundamentally open, engaged, and cosmopolitan. Moreover, they characterize the Chinese American community as a dynamic, fluid, and flexible global network and place Chinese America in a larger historical context beyond that of a single nation. They have seriously challenged the American-centered and nation-based research paradigm and promoted a more transnational, transcultural, and multilingual approach to the history of Asian American experience. (shrink)

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped (...) this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history. (shrink)

Although some historians have been researching and writing history from a transnational perspective for more than a century, it is only recently that this approach has gained momentum. But what is transnational history? How can a transnational approach be applied to historical study? Pierre Yves Saunier's dynamic introductory volume conveys the diversity of the developing field of transnational history, and the excitement of doing research in that direction. Saunier surveys the key concepts, methods and theories used (...) by historians, helping students to find their own way in this vibrant area. (shrink)

Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level of interpretive strategies, "Europe" remained the yardstick for historiographical explanation. This article (...) will use the example of postwar Japanese historiography to show that historians resorted to a European model in order to turn seemingly unconnected events in the Japanese past into a historical narrative. This is not to imply, however, that Japanese historiography passively relied on concepts from Western discourse. On the contrary, Japanese historians appropriated and transformed the elements of this discourse in the specific geopolitical setting of the 1940s and 1950s. This act of appropriation served the political purpose of positioning Japan with respect to Asia and the "West." However, on an epistemological level, the priority of "Europe" persisted; Japanese historiography remained a "derivative discourse." Studies in comparative historiography, therefore, should be attentive to these traces of the European descent of academic history and privilege the transnational history of historiography over meditations on its internal rationalization. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In what ways can the study of science and popular culture in the American context contribute to ongoing debates on popularization and popular science? This essay suggests that, for several reasons, attention to the antebellum era offers the most significant opportunity to realize more sophisticated understandings of science in American popular culture. First, it enables us to take advantage of comparative opportunities, both by benefiting from the advanced state of historiography for Victorian popular science and by engaging with (...) a generation of historiographic innovations by scholars in U.S. history, American studies, literature, and art history. Second, the emergence of popular science in the context of the republican ethos of the antebellum period provides an important vantage point from which to assess the extent to which the general issue of “popular science” and its cognates is historically variable and multiple in terms of the politics of knowledge. Third, the ramifications of the development of popular science for relations between science and the public well into the twentieth century cannot be understood until we gain a more clearly developed sense of the emergent period. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein’s theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and (...) 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions. (shrink)

The historiography of sexology is young. It is also expanding at a remarkable pace, both in terms of the volume of publications and, more notably, in terms of its geographical, disciplinary, and intersectional reach. This special issue takes stock of these new directions, while offering new research contributions that expand our understanding of the interdisciplinary and transnational formation of this field from the late 19th through to the mid 20th century. The five articles that make up this special (...) issue stage historiographical interventions by challenging the tendency within sexological history to focus on the medical, the homosexual, the human, and the Western European at the expense of other disciplines, diagnoses, non-human subjects, and geographical locations. A particular strength of these contributions is their focus on mapping conversations among and between sexologists on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid 20th century – particularly in Germany, Britain, and the US – and between East and West in the early Cold War era. (shrink)

History of education emerges during the course of the nineteenth century in Germany and is marked by four features. It is educational, and not scientific in nature, because it was written primarily for teacher education and training; it is national, or even nationalistic; it is oriented almost exclusively towards German philosophy; and it is indebted to Lutheran Protestantism. This model of pedagogical historiography leaves its mark on the historiographies that emerged later in England, France, and the United States. Taking (...) the example of Rousseau, this contribution makes it clear that these Lutheran and idealist premises lead to a one-sided historiography, so that the republican tradition in which Rousseau stood could be suppressed. On this basis, the paper points up the methodological necessity in historical research to examine contexts, giving up the idea of one history of education in favor of reconstruction of various traditions. The gain lies in making visible suppressed transnational languages that educational reflection made use of for centuries. In particular, a connection is revealed between the republican education of the eighteenth century in Europe and the concern with the issue of the “good citizen” that has preoccupied the American discussion from Jefferson to the Pragmatists to Diane Ravitch. (shrink)

In recent years historians have revisited the creation of the United Nations (UN) system by highlighting the enduring influence of Empire and recognizing the substantial role of cultural and scientific actors in wartime international diplomacy. The British biochemist Joseph Needham, who participated in the creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was one of them. Yet, if historians have recognized his role as the leading architect of the sciences at UNESCO, they still fall short of engaging (...) with the Chinese and imperial geography of his involvement with UNESCO. During the Second World War, Needham was stationed in war-torn China. As director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office, Needham not only organized Sino-British scientific cooperation against the Japanese invasion, but his mission inspired his engagement for a reform of international science and fueled an international campaign that led him to become the director of UNESCO’s Natural Science division after the war. By reconstructing his campaign in context, this article seeks to demonstrate how the imperial and transnational scientific networks of the wartime era fostered the creation of a scientific mandate for UNESCO. It situates Needham’s activism and ideas in the context of the Sino-Japanese war, imperial wartime technocracy, and China’s scientific nationalism. In so doing, it reveals a string of forgotten partners from China and the British Empire. Their conception of a reorganized international science and shared belief in modern science and its ideal of universality shaped Needham’s vision for science at UNESCO, while their activism contributed decisively to the success of his campaign. This inquiry hence participates in recent efforts to challenge the existing Eurocentrism corseting the historiography of the UN and expands the historiography of scientific internationalism beyond Europe and North America. Importantly, it also contributes to uncovering the technocratic ties established between Empire and the UN system from its onset. (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will give an international (...) audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

Writing about the history and politics of epidemics and pandemics requires stepping into a historiography that is expansive, transnational, and slotted into specific historical periods. This essay considers the main debates in this expansive historiography and highlights the strengths and limitations of dominant historiographical approaches to the study of epidemics and pandemics. This essay also interrogates the framing of three thematic periods, or categories, commonly identified by historians and social scientists in analyses of epidemics and pandemics: categories (...) of “colonial health,” “international health,” and “global health.” As this essay underscores, scholarship often analyzes epidemics and pandemics through overlapping and complex historical temporalities involving colonization, decolonization, and globalization. However, this approach is often constrained by the limitations of existing archives and the overwhelming focus of published scholarship on dominant institutions, scientific and political figures, and specific disease outbreaks that are commonly associated with categories of “colonial health,” “international health,” and “global health” from the late nineteenth to the present. As a result, scholarship may include linear narratives that flatten or generalize the legacies of epidemics and pandemics. The links between pathogens and pathologies are not linear, however, and colonial structures of power, disease tropes, and surveillance doctrines often persist across time and space. This essay ultimately seeks to challenge and complicate these dominant framings and categories from within. This approach highlights the connectedness—and complex continuities and discontinuities—in the political, economic, social, and scientific perceptions of and approaches to epidemic and pandemic risks. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of (...) the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

Translating the word Umgebung in a work by Goethe, Carlyle coined the term environment in the South of Scotland in 1828. Goethe’s usage involves reference to a Scottish subject, Macpherson’s Ossian. Referring to this, in 1942 Spitzer argued that the broader meaning of the word was misrepresented by Carlyle’s translation. However, after coining the term environment, Carlyle’s later work can be read as a significant realisation of this broader Goethean meaning, through his literary-critical discussion of Robert Burns, literary-philosophical Sartor Resartus, (...) and his biography and historiography. The term needs to be seen partly as a response to a large number of intersecting social, political, economic, and agrarian changes associated with the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and in particular the modernising transformations of the Lowland Clearances. But, through the ways in which this examination of the term’s coinage brings into relation Goethe, Carlyle, the philosophy of Thomas Reid, and a theory of concepts by Sir William Hamilton, the hybridising processes involved in coining the term can also be seen as constituting a pivotal moment of transnational cultural exchange, an encapsulation of diversity, an interdisciplinary interrelation of literary, philosophical, and social critique and a paradigm-shifting challenge to the authority of mechanism. These intersecting elements are peculiarly apt with regard to certain radical dimensions of continuing relevance to the counter-Enlightenment position of Adorno and Horkheimer, humanity’s relation with nature, our continuing struggles with the Enlightenment legacy, and to the expansive, plural, and potentially evolving character of the notion of environment – but also to the later emergence of environmentalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikh Philosophy as a Philosophy-of-PracticeMonika Kirloskar-Steinbach (bio)Some recent publications on Indian philosophy argue that the colonial narrative about the philosophical traditions from the subcontinent was erroneous. It wrongly suggested that the erstwhile Brahmanic thought embodied by the darśanas was an exhaustive representation of philosophical activity on the subcontinent and that this activity came to a grinding halt with the onset of European modernity. In an attempt at rectifying this (...) story, one path proposed by philosopher Vrinda Dalmiya (Dalmiya 2016, p. 125) is to cognize and fix the "epistemophilic excesses" in the field, that is, the obsessive compulsion in conventional academic philosophy to engage in theory for theory's sake. In the study of Indian philosophy, this malady manifests as the practice of channeling philosophical analysis solely through a darśanic framing. This monofocal lens, however, is unable to reflect either the diversity of practices on the ground or values like intellectual freedom that drive some such practices.Arvind-Pal Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), discussed here in this forum, speaks to these concerns and offers a possible way forward. Sikh Philosophy advocates a liminal perspective from which to engage with the set of philosophical practices that emanated on the subcontinent around the figure of Guru Nanak (1469–1539) and the teachings of the Sikh gurus (gurmat). In the first part of my response, I will bring into this conversation Mandair's philosophical orientation to ask whether and how he would contribute to that debate. In the second part, I will project the haumai—one concept doing much of the work in Sikh Philosophy—as one viable path that may be able to contribute to the correction of the epistemophilia currently afflicting a judicious study of world-philosophical traditions.In my limited understanding, Mandair's rendition of the haumai may serve as one component that could be implemented fruitfully in broadening the perspective on Indian philosophy. Mandair observes that a postcolonial sensibility demands a philosophical orientation that does not continue its proprietary attitude toward philosophical positions. I share his view. Instead of parading these positions as possessions that embellish one's academic finesse, they should be considered as ways of navigating life adequately. In doing so, however, the making of such navigational routes may profit from a deliberate reflection on them from different standpoints. [End Page 348]Halting Exclusivist Historiographical Trends in PhilosophyTwo recent handbooks on Indian philosophy reflect the growing awareness that changes in the field's self-understanding are imperative, should imperialist and colonial historiographies that affect this understanding be upturned. Jonardon Ganeri's editorial introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy—"Why Indian Philosophy? Why Now?"—argues that students of Indian philosophy should overcome the routinized fixation on the classical darśanas. In developing their accounts, they should factor in the "regionality, vernaculars, subaltern communities, [and] eccentrics" through which "scholarly networks, nodes of philosophical activity, transnational encounters, and contexts of philosophical invention" arose on the subcontinent (Ganeri 2017, p. 2). This broader approach would, in his view, not only be viable in halting the elitist and exclusivist historiography that was the default mode in the recent colonial past. In addition, it would be better equipped to grasp the richness of practices on the ground.Accordingly, his Handbook departs from the handbook genre on one core point: instead of delivering a supposedly comprehensive study of positions that would be indispensable to the reader to understand the intricacies of the field marked out as Indian philosophy, this Handbook chooses to narrate one multi-perspectival story about practices on the subcontinent that were philosophically motivated and are worthy of study today. It suggests through this move that there are other such possible stories that can be narrated. Relatedly, Purushottama Bilimoria and Amy Rayner's History of Indian Philosophy strives as well to make a case to go beyond the darśanic mold. It includes a variety of philosophical positions located on its peripheries. For example, Sikh philosophy, which notably is not included in the Ganeri volume, is incorporated here as a tradition that engaged darśanic practices. Balbinder Singh Bhogal, the author of... (shrink)

This article examines Chen Ziying, an American-trained Chinese biologist and his prewar efforts to bring his Woods Hole experience from the United States to China between 1930 and 1936. I argue that the Marine Biological Laboratory appears as a prominent American scientific institution in the twentieth century among visiting Chinese students and scholars who were drawn to the American approach of building world-class seaside laboratories to facilitate marine biological study while cultivating a collaborative culture via songs of biology. Chen was (...) one of the leading US-trained Chinese scientists who aspired to the international trend of developing coastal biology in the early twentieth century and was determined to modernize China’s discipline-building of biology with the construction of marine research facilities similar to the MBL. I show that Chen’s efforts of bringing the MBL practice to China took place at a time when science in China was overshadowed by the impulse of nationalism. Despite the nationalistic rhetoric, Chen was able to establish a Chinese connection with Woods Hole by introducing the MBL cultural practices of songs with biological significance. Lyrics from popular biological songs such as “It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus” and “Songs of Amoy” reflect not just Darwinian themes but also a transnational connection between American and Chinese biologists in Republican-era China––a period in modern Chinese history that is often characterized by soaring sentiments of nationalism. This paper sets out to reconsider the interplay of scientific nationalism and scientific internationalism in shaping marine science in modern China, as well as to reflect on the meanings of value-laden terms such as “nationalism” and “foreignness” and their conceptual impacts on writing the historiography of biology in twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Vaccines and vaccination are richly explored areas of study within the history of science and medicine, connecting related fields of the history of science and technology, and spanning across subfields such as biomedical sciences, animal studies, colonial and postcolonial history, and the history of global health. Vaccination is a thoroughly political act that is at once an intimate and local issue and a transnational one, with its particular set of politics connecting stakes for the individual and the community. Vaccination (...) also maps on narratives and temporal frameworks of disease with an ultimate goal of ending epidemics. Therefore, the essay takes these three analytical entry points to discuss the historiography of vaccination: the geographical, the political, and the temporal. We argue that through these lenses we can gain a more nuanced understanding of historical narratives we privilege, and in return, this understanding can enable us to explore past and current questions of health inequalities, validation practices, power relations and resistance and vaccine diplomacy. (shrink)

The sexually violated woman has become a salient symbol in feminist discourse, government policies, the media and transnational activism at this historical juncture. In this article, I seek to understand the conviction of anti-prostitution activists that all women in prostitution are victims (despite evidence to the contrary), and their simultaneous dismissal or condemnation of those women who identify as sex workers. The analysis identifies the centrality of victimhood to the affective logic of women activist leaders in the anti-prostitution movement, (...) and its embeddedness in discourses of suffering and redemption in Korean nationalist historiography. Sexual victimhood thus acquires the power to incite moral outrage, compel consensus and inhibit dissent. Sex workers further come to bear the historical and political burden of righting all that is wrong with the nation, making their elimination essential for the nation’s rescue. Critiques of capitalism and the state become footnotes and silences in this process. In effect, the victimhood of ‘prostituted women’ allows women activists to circulate effectively in the affective economy of the nation as well as in the global anti-trafficking campaign. The passionate activism of anti-prostitution women activists may say less about the state of prostitution than about the activists’ subjectivity as historical and global subjects, and the symbolic world that they locate themselves in. (shrink)

The general post-communist perspective of historiography on the Cold War era is that the world was divided into two blocs, so different and isolated from one another that there was no interaction between them whatsoever. As revisionist literature is expanding, the uncovered data indicates a far more complex reality, with a dynamic East-West exchange of goods, money, information, human resources, and technology, be it formal or informal, official or underground, institutional or personal. The current volume History of Communism in (...) Europe: Breaking the Wall: National and Transnational Perspectives on East-European Science tries to confer more detail to this perspec­tive, by bringing together research papers that focus on the history of science during the Cold War. The articles cover a wide range of subjects, from biology to philosophy and from espionage to medical practices, all sharing an ideological context that continuously impacted and molded the professional relations among scholars from both sides of the Iron Curtain. (shrink)

Thinking History Globally means thinking about the past and the present beyond national borders, language barriers, and enclosed regions. There are four thinking strategies to gain global perspectives: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing. Comparing is about contrasting between several cases and drawing new conclusions. Connecting is tracking the interdependences between cases and assessing their importance. Conceptualizing is recognizing that developments in one or several cases belong within a larger recurring pattern. Contextualizing is making sense of one case amidst developments world-wide. (...) This book offers a practical guide into these strategies of thinking by applying them to multiple historical cases, ranging from the first civilizations and up to the First World War. While doing that, Olstein also presents the twelve branches of history that outstand in the application of these four strategies and in thinking history globally: comparative, relational, international, transnational, oceanic, global, world, and big histories, historical sociology, civilizational analysis, world-system approach, and history of globalization. (shrink)

SummaryInternational intellectual history—the intellectual history of the international and an internationalised intellectual history—has recently emerged as one of the most fertile areas of research in the history of ideas. This article responds to eight essays inspired by my own contribution to this field in Foundations of Modern International Thought. It engages with their positive achievements regarding the recovery of other foundations for modern international thought: for example, in theology, historiography and gender history. It addresses some of the methodological problems (...) arising from the search for foundations, notably anachronism, presentism and diffusionism. It expands on others' arguments about the international thought of Hobbes and Locke and the limits of cosmopolitanism. Finally, it points the way forward for international intellectual history as a collaborative, interdisciplinary, transnational and transtemporal enterprise. (shrink)

This volume considers the confluence of world history and historical materialism, with the following guiding question in mind: given developments in the field of historical materialism concerned with the intersection of race, gender, labour, and class, why is it that within the field of World History, historical materialism has been marginalized, precisely as World History orients toward transnational socio-cultural phenomenon, micro-studies, or global histories of networks? Answering this question requires thinking, in an inter-related manner, about both the development of (...) World History as a discipline, and the place of economic determinism in historical materialism. This book takes the position that historical materialism (as applied to the field of World History) needs to be more open to the methodological diversity of the materialist tradition and to refuse narrowly deterministic frameworks that have led to marginalization of materialist cultural analysis in studies of global capitalism. At the same time, World History needs to be more self-critical of the methodological diversity it has welcomed through a largely inclusionary framework that allows the material to be considered separately from cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of global processes. (shrink)

Predicting the Past in the Ancient Near East: Mantic Historiography in Ancient Mesopotamia, Judah, and the Mediterranean World. By Matthew Neujahr. Brown Judaic Studies, vol. 354. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2012. Pp. xv + 300. $64.95. [Distributed by Society of Biblical Literature].

étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and (...) European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates. (shrink)

This article considers the implications of inferentialist philosophy of language for debates in the historiography of philosophy. My intention is to mediate and refine the polemics between contextualist historians and ‘analytic’ or presentist historians. I claim that much of Robert Brandom’s nuanced defence of presentism can be accepted and even adopted by contextualists, so that inferentialism turns out to provide an important justification for orthodox history of philosophy. In the concluding sections I argue that the application of Brandom’s theory (...) has important limits, and that some polemics by contextualists against presentists are therefore justified. (shrink)

This article focuses on how early modern astronomers and historians conceptualised the course of the history of astronomy. The aim is to describe the transition from the idea of closed historical cycles to the theory of infinite progress in astronomy. The cyclical Renaissance concept of the history of astronomy is addressed, highlighting in particular the emphasis placed by Protestant astronomers on the reliance of the history of astronomy on God. This is followed by a discussion of the theory of the (...) origin of astronomy as proposed by 17th century astronomers; and then a clarification of the unusual combination of the cyclical and linear approaches, which emerged in the historiography of astronomy in the 17th century. The article concludes with a brief outline of the transition to the concept of infinite progress that occurred at the end of the 18th century. (shrink)

Ethical issues that arise because of the transcendent power of globally oriented corporate entities vis-a-vis local communities. Common problems arise from plant closings and automation, here illustrated by cases of restructuring in Indiana. Public use limitations on "eminent domain" decisions are considered. Then attention turns to the lack of constraints available to regulate decisions made by a transnational corporation. Limited applicability of Rawls's contract theory is noted, then ten real-world space-time situations are reported that involve legally uncontrolled harm to (...) locals due to supra-community control by a corporation. (shrink)

La condition diasporique implique une confrontation culturelle qui oblige les populations exogènes à redéfinir les composantes symboliques de leur identité. Le cas des Syro-Américaines au xixe siècle montre en particulier que cette transplantation peut être l’occasion de réélaborer les frontières de l’identité et de négocier une restructuration des rapports de genres. Encouragées et inspirées par leurs homologues proche-orientales, les féministes syro-américaines ont ainsi enrichi leurs aspirations nationalistes d’une nouvelle réflexion sur le statut et le rôle des femmes en territoire d’accueil.

‘Globalization’ has become in recent years one of the central themes of social scientific debates. Social theories of globalization may be regarded as specific academic and analytic manifestations of wider forms of ‘global consciousness’ to be found in the social world today. These are ways of thinking and perceiving which emphasize that the whole world should be seen as ‘one place’, its various geographically disparate parts all being interconnected in various complex ways. In this article we set out how both (...) a general ‘ecumenical sensibility’ involving such ways of thinking, and its specifically academic variant, an ‘ecumenical analytic’, are simultaneously responses to ‘globalizing conditions’ and also products of the latter. We demonstrate how social theories of globalization, locatable in the overall set we call the ‘ecumenical analytic’, are reflexive thought-products, in that they both seek to investigate, and are made possible by, ‘globalizing conditions’. Rejecting the view that both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic are solely products of modernity, we show how such modes of consciousness and analysis were present in the period of Greek history between the death of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Roman Empire. We show how at that period a socio-political situation akin in certain ways to modern ‘globalizing conditions’ generated both an ecumenical sensibility and an ecumenical analytic, the latter most forcefully represented by a revolutionary new genre in historiography called Universal History. By examining the ideas of its most famous practitioner, the historian Polybius, we demonstrate that Universal History both provided a framework for understanding what we today would call ‘globalization’, and exhibited a remarkable degree of reflexive awareness about its own conditions of possibility. We seek to show that an attentiveness to ‘global’ processes and a reflexive understanding of what makes that form of thinking possible in the first place, are not solely confined to modernity but were identifiable features of intellectual production in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greece. In this way we argue that scholars today should not imagine that the contemporary ‘global turn’ in social thought is either unique or wholly historically unprecedented. (shrink)

During the nineteenth century, positivists charged that since historical accounts did not uncover the laws involved in human behavior, they were devoid of significance and should be replaced by sociological studies. Theorists, including Droysen, responded that man has a dual nature. Man's biological self is the inalterable substance of his life, while his spiritual self enables him to create its form. The objects of this creation, social institutions, embody the ideas and ideals of a social order and are transformed when (...) these values change. Remnants of the past are always contained within the new order and thus history both records the past and is embraced by the present. Since man is responsible for his progress he must know the past in order to fully understand and to act in the present. Droysen called this understanding of history Verstehen. (shrink)

This is the first special issue of the British Journal of the History of Philosophy to be devoted to the thought of the Middle Ages. Its topic is relations. The articles have been chosen to give an...

When the Taliban destroyed the famous statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, the outrage of the global community, including that of prominent Muslim religious leaders, was matched perhaps only by the pious euphoria of Afghanistan’s hardliners. They had finally succeeded in removing visible signs of idolatry from their landscape, and fulfilled, at least in their own eyes, a long overdue religious mission. In the words of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “Muslims (...) should be proud to destroy idols. Our destroying them was an act of praise for God.”1Yet such extreme acts of puritanical iconoclasm at the hands of Muslim fundamentalists, at least within modern history, have more.. (shrink)

"Bourgeois" and "Marxist" historiography are neither irreconcilable nor simply coordinated. While "bourgeois" historiography is characterized by relative distance from its subject, most "Marxist" historiography is absolutely identical with ideology and state interest, often clearly distorting the past. This does not correspond to Marx's concept of scientific method. But there is a difference between ""state Marxism" and "'free Marxism." Free Marxism exists only in a liberal society, "the West," representing the maximum of critical distance and being, insofar, a (...) characteristic part of bourgeois scholarship. Only State Marxism is clearly antagonistic to it, being the product of a mobilized state led by a small minority whose dissensions do not find public expression. (shrink)