British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Writing the History of the Global

British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

21-22 May 2009

ABOUT THIS EVENT | PROGRAMME | BOOKING FORM

Connectedness and Global History
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA)

At some level, it could be said that writing or practicing global history is just a matter of scale. If this is indeed the case, the real difficulty lies in the fact that most history-writing that is available is not conceived of on this scale. The task of the historian then appears to be one of reconciling, or rendering commensurable, histories written on smaller scales in order to produce a larger history. Again, taken in the abstract, the act of producing global histories from national histories is not entirely distinct in this conception of things from that of producing national histories from say local or regional histories.

My own predilection is to address this problem not so much through comparison – which is undoubtedly useful in its own way – but through connection. It is useful here to signal a set of distinctions which is largely what this presentation will be about. First, it is useful to distinguish between the historian as an archaeologist of past connections and the ‘historian as electrician’, who makes the connections himself. The latter can often be a matter of ‘connecting the unconnected’ (to parody Marcel Detienne); the former is a matter of pointing out how our habits of thought, our monolingualism, or our nationalisms (or our addiction to this or that empire), obscure important circuits and circulatory processes of the past. Second, it is important to point to different strategies for rendering smaller histories commensurable and thus integrable into a global history. I will attempt here to distinguish here between a newer tradition, which is linked to the social sciences and their techniques (statistical, anthropological, sociological etc), and a far older one which is itself closely tied up to the history of philology. The presentation will argue that while the former approach is currently more popular and arguably more facile, the production of global history at a monographic level is ultimately dependent to a very large extent on the latter. To be sure, this depends in some measure on the period one studies, and modern historians of the western world are somewhat less likely to sympathize with my position than historians of the pre-1800 world, or of China and India.