Tag: Global History

The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization – Interviews and Reviews

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Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter

University of Exeter Professor Martin Thomas’s masterful book The End of Empires and a World Remade (Princeton University Press, 2024) continues to spark discussion, most recently for the New Books Network and H-Diplo.

New Books Network Interview

Martin recently sat down with Morteza Hajizadeh for the New Books Network for a wide-ranging exploration of the book’s key arguments, takeaways, and contemporary resonances. You can listen to the interview here.

H-Diplo Review

The End of Empires was also recently given an insightful review by Eva-Maria Muschik for H-Diplo, which is reposted below:

H-Diplo Review Essay 621

Martin Thomas. The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization. Princeton University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780691190921.

20 March 2025

https://hdiplo.org/to/E621

Review by Eva-Maria Muschik, University of Vienna

Martin Thomas’s The End of Empires is a rich book. Drawing on a wide range of English-language scholarship and a broad base of European archival materials, Thomas puts the issue of violence front and center and reminds us that twentieth-century decolonization was a globally connected process, but not strictly speaking a post-1945 phenomenon. In his understanding, it is also not a finished process. The emphasis throughout the book is on politics, especially individual conflicts, but also transnational networking and international law, economic matters, and the sociology of violence. Readers interested in learning more about the people, ideas, and culture that animated the global history of decolonization may need to turn elsewhere. 

Continue reading “The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization – Interviews and Reviews” →

On Trade Books and Global History

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Map of Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. Printed in 1572 by Braun and Hogenberg in Civitates Orbis Terrarum. nicoolay/Getty Images

In this blog post Professor Maria Fusaro responds to some questions put to her by Professor Richard Toye about trade books and global history.

RT: In the many discussions that are currently going on around ‘decolonising’, one thing I’ve not seen addressed is the role of the publishing industry. Whatever happens in universities, publishers have a big influence on how history is discussed in the public sphere. Are there particular pitfalls surrounding trade publishing (as opposed to academic publishing), do you think?

MF: What a good question! Or I should probably say ‘questions’, as you raise more than one point as ‘trade books’ are an important phenomenon within the Anglosphere.

The first question you raise is about relationship between ‘academic’ and ‘trade’ publishing, and their different (divergent?) goals. Directly descending from this is a separate issue, namely how this affects efforts at decolonising the curriculum. And connected to both is how ‘trade’ and academic publishing need to interact.

Professional historians tend to be based in universities, and their scientific reputations are built through their production of academic essays and volumes. Once upon a time, there was an organic development between academic and trade books. One started to publish within the academic world, built his (I was going to write ‘her’ and then realised they were all men) scientific reputation and then, towards the end of his career or in retirement wrote for the general public. As a phenomenon peculiar to the Anglosphere, there was also the non professional historian, who eschewed the academic path and wrote ‘histories’ for the educated public, the latter type were (and are) usually very gifted writers.

These two publishing paths now run instead mostly in parallel, and historians frequently write both academic and trade books, which is great news for the profession, but also potentially dangerous. This is due to the growing schizophrenia between the type of books published by academic presses, and the growth of trade books with a ‘global’ subject, usually sensationalizing individuals or goods – single years are also in vogue. Continue reading “On Trade Books and Global History” →

Sydney’s Global Slavery Scandal of 1857

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Sugarcane harvesters, Reunion Island c.1885
Sugarcane harvesters, Reunion Island

Karin Speedy
Macquarie University, Sydney
Follow on Twitter @KarinESpeedy

In 1857, 51 Gilbertese (I-Kiribati) and 14 Solomon Islanders were spirited away from their homes. They were transported on the Sydney-based barque Sutton, and then sold as indentured sugar labourers on the French-owned island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. When the scandal hit the shores of Sydney, the incident  shifted from a global diplomatic dispute between the British and French empires to a local story, revealing the complexity of the colonial space where culpability was tied to local politics, class, and notions of nationality.[1] Continue reading “Sydney’s Global Slavery Scandal of 1857” →

A Parisian Ho Chi Minh Trail: Writing Global History Through Interwar Paris

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Antiimperial Metropolis cover

Michael Goebel
Freie Universität Berlin
Follow on Twitter @mgoebel29

Anxieties over the possible political fallouts of African and Asian migration to Europe have a much longer history than the current refugee crisis might have you suspect. Colonial migration to interwar Paris, as I argue in Anti-Imperial Metropolis, turned into an important engine for the spread of nationalism across the French Empire. Studying the everyday lives of these migrants, in turn, might also offer a way out of the impasse that global historians currently face.

Let me begin with an anecdote that encapsulates my argument: In autumn 1919, while statesmen gathered in Paris’s upscale banlieues to redraw the political world map, local police hired a discharged Vietnamese adjutant as an undercover agent. His task was “to exercise a discrete surveillance” over a compatriot of his who had distributed leaflets entitled “The Demands of the Annamite People” among diplomats and informal spokesmen in the city’s shabbier neighbourhoods.

The newly enlisted informer took his assignment very seriously. He filed daily reports on just about every movement in the city’s Vietnamese community, producing a paper trail that can now only be traced through the National Archives in Paris and in the Colonial Archives in Aix-en-Provence. Continue reading “A Parisian Ho Chi Minh Trail: Writing Global History Through Interwar Paris” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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British India

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From the perils of writing global history, to a global tale from 1623, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

4. In Defense of Global History

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Editor’s Note: It is hard to believe that the Imperial & Global Forum went live just a year ago. In the weeks leading up to the new year, please help us celebrate by checking out the year’s 10 most popular posts.

4. In Defense of Global History

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

worldconnectingphoto

[Update: Please also read Professor Bell’s response.]

A recent New Republic article by David A. Bell on the limitations of the ‘global turn’ has been making the rounds this month, and deservedly so. Bell’s article reviews Emily Rosenberg’s 2012 edited volume A World Connecting: 1870-1945. [1] Nestled within it, however, is a much larger critique of the global historiographical shift toward ‘networks’ and ‘globalization’.

Bell’s criticisms are provocative. They are eloquent.

But are they fair? Let’s take a look. [continue reading]

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter

influenze spreading disease

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From the West’s decline to globalizing time, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1946-1994

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Dr. Nicholas Grant
American Studies, University of East Anglia
Follow on Twitter @nicholasggrant

The Radical History Review Special Issue on ‘The Global Antiapartheid Movement’ No. 119 (Spring, 2014)
The Radical History Review Special Issue on ‘The Global Antiapartheid Movement’ No. 119 (Spring, 2014)

Last month saw the publication of the Radical History Review’s special issue on ‘The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement’. Appearing on the 20th anniversary of South African democracy, the issue contains articles, roundtables and review pieces that explore a range of transnational connections that shaped political opposition to white supremacy in South Africa. As editors Lisa Brock, Alex Lichtenstein and Van Gosse comment in their introduction, “in seeking contributions to this issue, we made a deliberate effort to give the truly global nature of the movements in solidarity with southern Africa their due.”[1]

Whilst activism in the US and Britain continues to dominate much of the scholarship on the international anti-apartheid movement, this special issue makes an important effort to move beyond this occasionally restricting narrative. Continue reading “The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1946-1994” →

Is Global History Suitable for Undergraduates?

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world mapMarc-William Palen
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

Last week, I came across two provocative blog posts, at The Junto and the Imperial and Global History Network (IGHN), on teaching global history that got me thinking reflectively about my own recent experiences of approaching American and British imperial history from a global historical perspective. The big takeaways from both pieces seem to be: 1) teaching global history is a challenge not just for students but for teachers; and 2) that the net positive from teaching history from a global vantage point at the graduate level far outweighs said challenges. However, The Junto’s Jonathan Wilson concludes by quite explicitly questioning whether global historical approaches are in fact suitable for the first-year undergraduate classroom. Continue reading “Is Global History Suitable for Undergraduates?” →

The Global Origins of Early Vietnamese Republicanism, Part II

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Christopher Goscha
Professor of History, University of Quebec at Montreal

Professor Goscha concludes his two-part Forum exploration of the global origins of Vietnamese Republicanism [Read Part I].

The emperor can be seen seated in an ornate box, upper left, overlooking proceedings of Japan’s new elective parliament, the Imperial Diet. “Illustration of the Imperial Diet of Japan” by Gotō Yoshikage, 1890 [2000.535] Sharf Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The emperor can be seen seated in an ornate box, upper left, overlooking proceedings of Japan’s new elective parliament, the Imperial Diet. “Illustration of the Imperial Diet of Japan” by Gotō Yoshikage, 1890
[2000.535] Sharf Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The East Asian Origins of Vietnamese Republicanism

Located on China’s long southeastern coastal flank, Vietnam, Korea, and even Japan had long participated in an East Asian civilizational world based on the Middle Kingdom. For centuries overland and maritime routes channeled administrators, Confucian scholars, Buddhist monks, artists, and political theorists to and from the Middle Kingdom and beyond. Vietnam and Korea may have resisted the colonial ambitions of their immense northern neighbor, but they had, like the Gauls dealing with the Romans, borrowed heavily from the Chinese political, social, religious, linguistic, and cultural canon long before Atlantic ideas arrived. Continue reading “The Global Origins of Early Vietnamese Republicanism, Part II” →

The Global Origins of Early Vietnamese Republicanism, Part I

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Christopher Goscha
Professor of History, University of Quebec at Montreal

National emblem of the Republic of China, 1912-1928. Yuan Shikai (left) and Sun Yat-sen (right) with flags representing the early Chinese republic.
National emblem of the Republic of China, 1912-1928. Yuan Shikai (left) and Sun Yat-sen (right) with flags representing the early Chinese republic.

Utilizing a global historical approach, Professor Goscha explores the dynamic origins of Vietnamese Republicanism, in part I of this two-part Forum series.

Just as nationalism, liberalism, and republicanism spread across the Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries, underpinning a series of revolutions stretching from Philadelphia to Paris by way of Port au Prince and Bogota, so too did people, their books, papers, and print technology move such powerful ideas across the Indian Ocean into East Asia with similar effect by the turn of the 20th century.[1] This global transfer of ideas, however, did not move in a straight line. Nor did it necessarily arrive through the colonial connection, even though Euro-American imperial states had colonized much of the Afro-Asian world during this period.

The arrival of Republican ideas to Vietnam is a case in point. Continue reading “The Global Origins of Early Vietnamese Republicanism, Part I” →

Sleuthing the Origins of ‘Global History’

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LinkedIn-Power-SleuthingMarc-William Palen
Cross-Posted from the New Global History Forum
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

 

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

—Max Beerbohm, 1896.

Historians are often charged — sometimes correctly — with precipitously proclaiming a “new” field of study: a field that, upon further investigation, is shown to be remarkably similar to earlier turns in the historiographical timeline. The post-colonial and subaltern “turns” of the 1980s are cases in point, as they, however unwittingly, tended to ignore the prodigious and overlapping work within Area Studies that had appeared in preceding decades. I duly began to wonder if the term “global history” might prove to be yet another illustrative example. Continue reading “Sleuthing the Origins of ‘Global History’” →

Diminishing Returns of the Global Turn

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david avrom bellDavid A. Bell
Lapidus Professor of History, Princeton University
Contributing Editor, The New Republic

I am grateful to Marc-William  Palen for his smart, sharp comments on my New Republic essay, and also for his generous offer to let me respond to them on this blog.

Palen calls my essay ‘provocative’ and ‘eloquent’, but also ‘unfair’. I certainly prefer this judgment to ‘balanced, but dull and inarticulate’, but the adjective ‘unfair’ still rankles a little. In particular, Palen charges me with confusing page counts and criticism; with mixing up Atlantic history and global history; and with ‘expect[ing] the impossible’ from the volume that I was reviewing.

Of these charges, it is the third that really gets to the substantive differences between us. Continue reading “Diminishing Returns of the Global Turn” →

In Defense of Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter13 Comments

worldconnectingphotoMarc-William Palen
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

[Update: Please also read Professor Bell’s response.]

A recent New Republic article by David A. Bell on the limitations of the ‘global turn’ has been making the rounds this month, and deservedly so. Bell’s article reviews Emily Rosenberg’s 2012 edited volume A World Connecting: 1870-1945. [1] Nestled within it, however, is a much larger critique of the global historiographical shift toward ‘networks’ and ‘globalization’.

Bell’s criticisms are provocative. They are eloquent.

But are they fair? Let’s take a look. Continue reading “In Defense of Global History” →