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College Notes (Lectures) Global History (5181V4GH) The Human Web, ISBN: 9780393925685
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Global History (5181V4GHY) Summary The Human Web + extra Readings & Lectures.
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College aantekeningen (Tutorials) Global History (5181V4GH) The Human Web, ISBN: 9780393925685
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Summary Global history: the human web
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Global History CompilationDocument
Contents
Global history lecture 1 12-9.................................................................................................................2
Global history lecture 2 19-9.................................................................................................................6
Great debates in Global History I – civilisations.................................................................................6
Global history lecture 3 26-9...............................................................................................................11
Guest lecture: Miguel John Versluys................................................................................................11
Global history lecture 4 10-10.............................................................................................................14
Global history lecture 5 17-10.............................................................................................................19
Global history lecture 6 24-10.............................................................................................................24
Middle east and religion..................................................................................................................24
Global history lecture 7 31-10.............................................................................................................32
Global history lecture 8 7-11...............................................................................................................34
Global history lecture 9 14-11.............................................................................................................41
Global history lecture 10 28-11...........................................................................................................48
Global history lecture 11 5-12.............................................................................................................54
Global history lecture 12 12-12...........................................................................................................58
1
,Global history lecture 1 12-9
‘The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see’ - Sir Winston Churchill
What is history?
- Time
- space
- structure and process
- agency (wilful behaviour)
- story
- continuity, change, trends, turning points.
‘History is an argument without end’ - Pieter Geyl
What is history?
- History is the study of the past (which is not static).
- It is the study of change over time in the past.
- The past may be over, but its history itself changes over time (the storytelling of the past
changes over time).
Historical research
- Sources
- Discovery, information
- Investigation, evidence
- Reconstruction, chronology, causality
- Interpretation
- Discussion
- Debate
Important concept within global history
- Historicism
o Each period in history has its own unique beliefs and values and is best understood
only in its own historical context.
o These internal meanings of history need to be discovered by historians by dissecting
the circumstances and contexts
o Example of historicism: slavery. To understand historical slavery you need to look at
slavery within its historical context (how did people who were alive at that time
think about human rights?)
- Metahistory
o The quest for all-encompassing meaning
o patterns, regularities,
o teleology (history as progress (Hegel)/history is moving towards a certain ending
point)
o Example of teleology: in the past history was moving towards the last
judgement/divine intervention
o Another example of teleology: today a lot of people believe that history is moving
towards ever increasing complexity
2
, - Historiography
o Discussion about interpretation of the past
o Historiography concerns the study of the writing of history.
o It focuses on historical arguments, theories and interpretations of the past, which
change over time. How have schools of thought on particular events changed over
time?
o Example of historiography: the cold war. The traditional way of looking at the cold
war was the oppression of the Soviet-Union. Revisionist historians noticed that the
contribution of the imperialistic USA was missing. Post revisionist historians claim
that the cold war was a product of the interaction between the USA and the Soviet-
Union.
Trends in historiography
- States, wars and men – political history
- Social history, Economic history
- Women’s history, Gender history
- Cultural history and the history of ideas
- Local history, microhistory, subaltern history
- History of animals, Disability History
- Global History
‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ - George Santayana
Global history: the exercise of decentring Europe without substituting Europe with Eurasia. All the
parts of the world play a role.
Global History and its Historiography
- Big or Universal History: traces history from the beginning of written information about the
past up to the present
- World History: common patterns that emerge across all cultures.
- Global History: exploring the various trajectories of cross-border entanglements around the
globe.
Is the anthropocene a new geological epoch?
Are we exiting the Holocene?
To prove that there is indeed such a thing as the Anthropocene there must be evidence in geological
time (you need to be able to see tracks of human activity in the top layer of the ground (heavy
metal, microplastic, radioactive substances)
- Started between 1750-1800
- Since 1950: stage 2 of the anthropocene, the great acceleration
Big history: David Christian’s TedTalk:
- ‘A return to universal history will show that there are indeed ‘simplifying perspectives’ that
reveal a profound orderliness in human history’
- According to Christian, there are the large-scale patterns in human history
o Increase in complexity over the course of the earth’s 13.7 billion years of history
o Collective learning
3
, o Control over bio-spheric resources
- Ever increasing complexity caused by ‘Goldilock conditions‘ creating ‘Threshold moments‘
- The major force that makes human beings different from other species is Collective Learning
Universal history
- Christian: ‘the attempt to understand the past at all possible scales’ – contingency,
specificity, patterns and details
- Bridge gaps with: biology, chemistry, geology, earth sciences, astronomy, cosmology
- Create ‘global citizenship’
The attempt to understand universal history at all possible scales is normative to creating
‘global citizenship’.
A plea for Universal History William McNeill and David Christian both believe that the study of
Universal history is an important tool to learn lessons for the future.
Terminology/confusing terms:
- World history (McNeills): history of civilisations, internal dynamics and comparison
o Record the whole significant and knowable past
o Precursors: Herodotus and Ssu-ma Chen
o Historiography of world history: religion (Christian, Jewish), dynastic rationales,
science
Meta history of world history: divine intervention, dynastic intervention, advance of
freedom
o European enlightenment, scientific revolution
o Emergence of liberal version of history
meta history: advance of freedom
o Oswald Spengler: intergang des Abendlandes (rise and fall of civilisations: predicting
the decline of the west)
o Arnold Toynbee: the history of the world
o The disappearance of universal and world history
The requirements of science and the ‘Rankean’ revolution
The rise of nationalism
Fragmentation of scholarship, ever increasing specialisation
o The comeback of universal and world history
Was it ever fully gone?
More information and data to draw from
More techniques to apply – the ‘chronometric revolution’
- Global history: history of contacts and interactions between civilisations
o the largest and most inclusive framework of human experience (civilisations that
encounter other civilisations)
o examples:
the cockatoo (how does a European emperor know about a bird that lives in
Australia?)
and the ecological effect of colonialism (historians could see in the layers of
the soil that because of biological genocide (native Americans were not
immune to European diseases) forest re-emerged on farmland)
o core concerns of global history:
Connectivity and the interconnected world
4
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