Content area
Full text
Abstract
The turn towards Global history shows no sign of abating. It seems that across the discipline, historians are becoming increasingly interested in understanding the past on a planetary scale. Prominent Imperial historians, in particular, have been among the most fervent advocates of Global history. So close are the concerns of some Imperial history-particularly British Imperial history-to those of Global history, that it is getting harder to disentangle the two. Despite this we argue that, whilst both fields are overlapping and heterogeneous, historians should reflect more explicitly on the methodological differences that exist between them. In the process we point out some lessons that Global historians might learn from Imperial historians, and viceversa. We argue for "connected histories of empire" that seek to uncover links that operated across the formal borders of imperial formations and that deploy novel spatial frameworks. Such an approach would draw on the diverse methodologies developed by Imperial and Global historians who seek to write both "comparative" and "connected" histories. We point the way towards histories that are more than imperial, but less than global.
Introduction
The "global turn," the move to writing "Global history," represents one of the most significant historiographical developments of recent decades. Scarcely perceptible in the 1990s, this new approach to questions of scale and narrative has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the new century. It seems set to entrench its scholarly hegemony still further. Historians of the British Empire have played a key role in accomplishing the global turn and, in the UK at least, have increasingly come to identify themselves as "Global and Imperial historians." Conferences, research centres and postgraduate programmes promising entry into a sparkling new field of "Global and Imperial history" (presumably more attractive, to funders and students alike, than plain old Imperial history) have proliferated. But what is the exact relationship between the two component parts of this new academic fusion? Have they been added to the mix in equal measure? Should Imperial history be regarded as a mere prelude to twentieth-century narratives of "globalization," the latter understood as a very recent process by which places and peoples have become ever-more densely interconnected? Or is globalization a process with a longer history, stretching back into the early modern...