Global History: Historiographical Feasibility and Environmental Reality
Author(s)
Schafer, Wolf
Abstract
The history of the world since the Second World War forced a “genuinely global perspective upon us,” observed Hobsbawm in 1989, adding that “‘world history’ is no longer the Western scholar’s polite concession to UNESCO, but the only history that can be written.” In this vein, it has been tried to distinguish world history from global history and to present some compelling arguments in favor of the latter – which is, the history Hobsbawm meant when he referred to “world history” with apt rhetorical overstatement as the “only” and most relevant history today. He has also tried to spell out what it means to write global history “adequately.” The answer has to address the paradox that global history must be big enough to capture the planetary processes of our time and small enough to satisfy the requirements of normal academic research, beginning with doctoral dissertations. Traditional world history easily meets the first but hardly the second condition and is, perhaps, more a calling than a craft. However, the issue is not world history or global history; rather, it is the distinction between the two and the understanding that global history is a piecemeal history for global processes in the twentieth century.
