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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge World History, Volume VI: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 C.E., Part 1 Foundations ed. by Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, and: The Ascent of Globalization by Harry Blutstein, and: What Is Global History? by Sebastian Conrad, and: Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 by Jeroen Duindam, and: Global Conceptual History: A Reader ed. by Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier
  • Jeremy Adelman
The Cambridge World History, Volume VI: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 C.E., Part 1 Foundations. Edited by jerry bentley, sanjay subrahmanyam, and merry e. wiesner-hanks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 509 pp. $170 (cloth).
The Ascent of Globalization. By harry blutstein. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. 256 pp. £70 (cloth).
What Is Global History? By sebastian conrad. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016. 299 pp. $29.95 (cloth).
Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800. By jeroen duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 384 pp. $27.99 (paper).
Global Conceptual History: A Reader. Edited by margrit pernau and dominic sachsenmaier. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 400 pp. $39.95 (paper).

Global History or the History of Globalization?

“Despite the continuing popularity of biographies of famous people and books about major wars, history is in crisis,” says Lynn Hunt. And it is “not just one of university budgets.” Can the global turn help? Does it make history more relevant, more useful? Hunt’s answers are hesitantly optimistic, not least because globalization has brought a fresh harvest of questions and concerns that historians might profitably engage. But to do so, they will have to think about their practice differently, to learn the art of collaboration, to develop skills in listening across the divides of cultural, political, and economic history, and to cease thinking of other genres and places as exotica.4

One route is to embrace the study of globalization, to turn the making of our global life the subject. Historians came late to this party; only since the early 2000s, after other social scientists turned globalization into their mantra, have historians made the study of modern connections and integration so central to their stories. Another tack is to create a [End Page 701] new field, to exploit the frenzy to understand shared life on an overheating planet but not reduce the field to explaining contemporary affairs. This is “global history,” whose contours have been outlined in a short, thoughtful, book by the German historian Sebastian Conrad, as well as in other recent books. The recent energy behind the history of globalization and global history is apparent in the flurry of new journals, like the Journal of Global History and New Global Studies, and manifestos for “global intellectual history” and “global economic history,” as well as from proliferating PhD and MA degree programs.

Is this a happy convergence of historians and other social scientists? Or are global history and the history of globalization two separate fields born of the same post-1989 reproductive system of market integration, two fields jostling like siblings to aid in Lynn Hunt’s search for a history for the global age? The answers to these questions depend as much on definitions and assumptions as on the topics. This survey of recent books on “the global” suggests that global history and the history of globalization are not the same thing, though they overlap in important and confusing ways.

One thing is clear: the older tradition of world history provided a foundation for both the history of globalization and global history. What its fate will be in the global turn remains to be seen, though as the editors of The Cambridge World History VI argue, world history must retain its currency. If world history grew from efforts to bring the whole world into the picture, or at least to encompass large geographic or “civilizational” spaces into comparative analysis (the rise of “the West” compared to something else being the most common staple), it did draw attention to worlds beyond the West. Often charged with being Eurocentric and overdoing the homogeneity of their categories, world historians at least gave “the Rest” a role, if not always an uplifting one, and...

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