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

Regions in World History
R. Bin Wong (UCLA)

By moving beyond both national and civilizational units global history puts its subjects into a far larger spatial frame.  Scholars examine diverse subjects, including people, religious ideas, physical goods, social practices, political ideologies and economic institutions as they circulate across a myriad of local situations.  Typically, global history highlights the connections across wide spaces more than the features of local contexts that shape the meanings and significance of the connections between them.  With a stress on connections over contexts, global history can avoid certain pitfalls of previous units of analysis, but to engage in new ways some of the political, economic and cultural topics that were previously addressed within national and civilizational units, attention to other spatial possibilities, such as regions may prove useful.