Papers by Comparativ Journal
Comparativ, 2021
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/165
The transformation of Eas... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/165
The transformation of East-Central Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union is often identified with serious changes in property relations and corresponding restructuring of societies, an increase in intra-societal inequality and an adaptation to the institutional structure of the West. The field of culture appears as a derived sector in which, on the one hand, the penetration of Western practices and norms is also stated, but on the other hand, the processing of subjective perceptions and the emotional reworking of the perceived injuries is localized. This also seems compatible with ideas in which culture, and especially its nationalized and nationalizing form, serves as the remaining bracket for socio-economically drifting apart societies. Such framings of culture seem to help explaining the conspicuous nationalism in East-Central Europe.
With its focus on cultural policy in East-Central Europe, this issue takes a different perspective, asking how the transformation of the cultural scene took place, how the understanding of culture and cultural policy changed, who initiated these changes and gained interpretive sovereignty over them, and how this kind of transformation in turn had an effect on the West, offering it a new kind of engagement with experiences of globalization, which were more or less accepted and used.
In doing so, the authors must confront an evident contradiction in the research litera- ture, in which some assume a diffusion of Western patterns, while others claim that, in contrast to the economy, the transformation in the cultural sphere followed entirely nati- onal traditions (with the interesting exception of the GDR, which was incorporated into the Federal Republic and had therefore no autonomous tradition to be followed). These astonishingly contradictory interpretations indicate that empirical evidence cannot be that far off, but rather that examples have so far been sought to illustrate preconceived interpretations. This is not surprising when one considers the enormous political charge that accompanies the interpretation of transformation, for each of these interpretations legitimizes a different policy in the present, for which the narrative shaping of the past forms the basis.
The same is true for the thematic field of cultural policy: an approach that not only con- nects the phenomena under investigation with a spatial format, very often the nation- state, but also takes into account the multi-scalar and interwoven situation under the global condition, is the main way out of this trap. Transformation cannot be understood solely as a transnational process or even as a global convergence, nor is it sufficient to move to the micro-level of the local and regional or to observe solely the regulation by national legislation and institutions. Cultural policy (like many other social dimensions, for that matter) is much more complexly spatialized and each of these dimensions fol- lows a different geography and different traditions and temporalities. As Thomas Höpel shows with the help of Polish and East German examples, this has completely opposite consequences for larger metropolises and for the countryside and smaller cities, the latter being much more dependent on subsidies from higher-level entities such as the state or the European Union or from landscapes of culture organized to sustain cultural infra- structures.
The course of the transformation is understood incompletely when taking its begin- ning as a zero hour in which everything starts anew as if on a tabula rasa and nothing remains as it was. On the contrary, many practices and institutional settings continued, were adapted to new social contexts or even became places of resistance against certain dimensions of the transformation - such as the Berlin Volksbühne, which Antje Dietze presents in her article.
The studies on Poland and Hungary provided by Przemysław Czapliński and Kristóf Nagy/Márton Szarvas again reveal a caesura at the nation-state level, which, after the state’s withdrawal from regulating the cultural sector since the mid-2010s, led to a new kind of interference in culture and even the intention to control it with instruments of censorship and positive discrimination against national conservative tendencies. Ho- wever, these efforts are by no means easy to impose, but come up against the cultural pre- ferences of the public and the orientation of a significant part of cultural actors towards international trends, which are reinforced by their integration into patterns of European cultural policy and, above all, by the presence of new media.
Thus, the example of cultural policy in Eastern Europe since 1989 proves to be a lesson in new approaches to transnational history that is not satisfied with stating cross-border interconnections (or observing nationalization as their opposite), but instead focuses attention on the diversity of new spatializations that can offer a key to understanding global processes.
Comparativ, 2021
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/164
Many approaches in the fi... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/164
Many approaches in the field of global history are based on the hypothesis that it is not so much the processes within societies that explain historical change, but rather the encounters and interactions between societies. This thesis is in conflict with Maximilien Robespierre’s famous doubt as to whether revolutions can be successfully exported or whether every society must wait for the moment when it is ready for radical change. Both positions have their supporters and the latter was not by chance emerging during the French revolution when the very concept of society in its national form was born. Since unanimity is not to be expected on this question, the pondering answer suggests itself that it all depends. But on what? And how can these factors be determined?
Heike Paul and her colleagues, who have contributed to this issue on re-education, have opted for a triangular constellation which, although obvious in previous research, has nevertheless been largely neglected. They compare the efforts of the US-military and administrators in Japan and Germany to initiate a society freed from fascism and on its way to democracy. But was the American presence only a supportive factor for already existing tendencies towards democratic behaviour and attitude or had the US-army to create something from scratch? How to conceptualize the project of re-education: in terms of a decided diffusion of values or as an impulse for the self-healing of a society ready for democratization after the collapse of the Nazi or the Tenno regimes?
Parallel processes such as the shaping of cultural relations between the (here primarily American) occupying power and the inhabitants and authorities of Japan and Germany as war-loser states can apparently be compared well in a global-historical setting. Thus, ideas about more general trends coalesce from case studies, which can then be matched with overarching explanations and narratives on macro processes. But the very different terms in which these relationships are described also point to the recalcitrance that the material shows towards this procedure. Why is it called in one (the German) case “re-education” and for the other (the Japanese) “democratization” and “modernization”? These terms indicate, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, a direction in which the process was conceived – returning or advancing to a desirable state. And that, in turn, says much more about the positioning of those who wanted to re-educate (or cure, as Richard Brickner suggested in his 1943 book “Is Germany incurable?”) or modernize, as it was thought in relation to Japan, which obviously had not yet had its future behind it as the Germans did with the Weimar Republic. The fact that rhetorical figures (and practices such as land dispossession on the island of Okinawa) of the civilizing mission
from colonial contexts were not far behind is shown by Akino Oshiro’s contribution on the transformation of Okinawa into a huge American military base. In the German context, it is rather the contradiction in the re-education policy between the goal of the greatest possible capacity for democracy and the distrust of incurable Germany that is expressed. The fact that this contradiction did not disappear with the occupying troops,
but continues to shape the debate on democracy in Germany to this day, is one of the legacies of the re-education period.
As contradictory as this period was, it cannot simply be reduced to a global moment with only slight variations in its manifestations in different places. Rather, we observe a wide spread of constellations that could be observed at about the same time at different ends of the Eurasian complex in confrontation with the USA, which had become the global power and the role-model for democracy. In this respect, the comparative procedure here
rather leads to the identification of considerable differences with some similarities on the surface of events and thus forms a barb to a history of linear progressive convergence through global processes.
Comparativ, 2020
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/163
Editorial:
The role of ... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/163
Editorial:
The role of the slavery-based plantation economy in the development of capitalism has preoccupied many generations of scholars. This is related to a number of very important questions, the answers to which have a lasting impact on narratives about modernity and the ways it emerged in what is often called the early modern times. Was slavery-based production good for the initial accumulation of vast fortunes that became the precondition of modern capitalism, but ultimately incompatible with a capitalism based on the marketization of labour that is “freely” offered and demanded? Or did the history of slavery and other forms of forced and coerced labour, regardless of the moral scruples that became public for religious reasons (in England and the USA) or out of a predominantly
secular-humanist motivation (in France), accompany capitalism until the social counterforces of decolonization were strong enough to shake off this form of particularly crass exploitation (even if not inconsiderable remnants persist to this day)?
This fundamental debate, which provides a subject for an entire direction within current historiography, namely the New History of Capitalism, is now profiting from the enormous expansion of its empirical basis through the global-historical interest of the last three decades. It makes a difference whether one looks at the problem from the perspective of the one or the other empire. This was already clear to contemporaries who, in the famous renunciation of the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna, left a loophole for the Spanish and Portuguese, who were allowed to continue taking slaves on board south of the equator and transporting them to their colonial empire in South and Central America (which was, however, soon to shrink considerably). Napoleon had indeed burned his particularly republican-minded troop contingents in a vain attempt to restore slavery on Saint Domingue, but immediately after returning from his first exile on Elba he decreed the abolition of slavery. In between lay the dramatic defeat of the French against the English navy at Trafalgar and the sale of Louisiana to the USA: in view of the impossibility of asserting naval supremacy against the British competitor, there followed a provisional rejection of the Atlantic as the relevant space of expansion and geopolitical projection which implied a return to a different type of capitalism, based not on the trade ports on the coast but on agriculture and manufactures in the hinterland of metropolitan France. That this meant neither a definitive rejection of colonial projects nor of exploitation through forced labour by French elites was soon to become apparent in North Africa and later in Southeast Asia.
What was supposed to be exemplified here by the French case is made plausible by this thematic issue with many more examples: there is no one, universally valid answer to the question of the relationship between slavery and capitalism, but slavery and other forms of forced labour are part of the history of capitalism and cannot be excluded from its definition. What form this connection took, what consequences it had for the persistence of monocultures (and therefore impacting chances for diversified development afterwards and until today), and how it inscribed and continues to inscribe itself in the cultural patterns of societies that were based on slave labour to a huge extent varies and
invites a history of capitalisms in the plural.
Comparativ, 2020
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/161
Editorial
The topic of... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/161
Editorial
The topic of empire continues to keep the social sciences at large busy. After it had seemed for a long time as if the topic had definitely been handed over to historians, who are concerned with a past phenomenon that only occurs as a nostalgic reflex in the present, empires are suddenly also of interest again to the social scientists concerned with the present under quite different aspects. The question of whether the United States was and still is an empire and whether such imperial configurations were needed to maintain an international order after the multilateralism of the Cold War had come to an end played a crucial role in relaunching the debate about empires. A second layer of interest was informed by postcolonially inspired interest in the continuing mechanisms of earlier colonial empires now striking back in various ways and thus remaining present in today’s seemingly post-imperial world. At a third level, observations that view empires as a rather loose association of rule with unfinished territorialization came to the fore in interpretations of empire as a more appropriate form of governance under conditions of global or at least transregional weakening or even dissolution of boundaries.
While we recently looked back at the similarities and differences between empires for the historical period from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in a historically comparative thematic issue of this journal (no 3/2019), the current double issue, conceived from the perspective of historical sociology, is concerned with a geographically even broader comparison that seeks to revise the thesis of a European exceptionalism in the history of colonialism and imperialism that is often put forward implicitly rather than explicitly. This makes it necessary, first of all, to look for colonial imperial expansion also outside Europe and not to construct a “non-European world” as the target of expansion, as an overseas history, now out of fashion, did for a long time. This means not only to question the geography of comparative studies of empires, but also to reflect critically on their privileged time frame and to include examples that lie beyond the particular European expansion period that is often portrayed as starting in the fifteenth century. In a third level, the nesting of empires is at stake, because the confrontation with imperial conquest from outside by no means put an end to state-building processes inside the imperially overformed regions, from which a whole complex of new questions about the relationship of the various empire-building processes can be derived.
Colonialism, in this perspective, is not a relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans, but a much broader, almost universal kaleidoscope of subjugation, settlement into regions other than the one of origin, and arrangements between external and internal elites. What distinguishes pre-modern forms of imperial rule and colony-building from those since the late eighteenth century, however, are (1) their positioning in struggles for dominance at a global scale, (2) the complicated blending between the formation of nation-states and ongoing attempts at imperial expansion, which can by no means be reduced to a teleology from empire to nation, and (3) the relationship between capitalist adventurism and political projects of empire building, which follow different logics but always interact.
To abstract these processes in such a way that they can be made available as theoretical elements to other disciplines requires at the same time a wide range of expertise for many case studies, an important selection of which is brought together in this issue. Specialists will read these case studies as enriching knowledge about individual empires, while the thematic issue as a whole, not least with its introduction by the editors and its afterword by Frederick Cooper, pursues an ambition that goes beyond the individual case and at the same time offers a broadening of perspective beyond meticulously deconstructed European exceptionalism and a contribution to a general theory of empires.
Comparativ, 2020
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/160
Editorial
Global histo... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/160
Editorial
Global history has achieved its impressive progress not least by suggesting intellectual entanglements between previously little connected fields of research. The present issue is a further example of this successful strategy. The editors have succeeded in bringing together specialists in the history of development with the young field of global urban history and putting them into a fruitful dialogue. The history of development has a long tradition, but it has often been concerned with the involvement of international organizations, national frameworks, or the imperial constellations of metropolis and (former) colony.
It is by no means a new insight that urbanization is not only a sign of “development” but also poses enormous challenges to exactly this development. With an accuracy that is impressive at first glance, statisticians announced some years ago that the time had come when more people would live in cities than in the countryside. This statement was visualized with two intersecting trend lines, so that everyone can see that this tendency will linearly expand into the future – reversal is out of the question. But what does it mean to live in a city? Do seemingly unambiguous conventions calculate that every community of more than 2000 inhabitants should be called a city (as the French administration assumes) or that one should orientate oneself by historically grown city law (as in the German case)? Obviously not, because the cities of the Global South, be they of megalomaniacal proportions or just average greetings, obviously do not follow such criteria from European historical tradition. They do not grow restricted by planning law and cadastre, but rather proliferate into a surrounding area that is difficult to delimit;
people change, whatever the above-mentioned statistics suggest about their stationary way of life, back and forth between city and countryside, sometimes daily, sometimes
seasonally. Urban infrastructures can hardly keep up with such fluidity, quite apart from the fact that they often have colonial origins and were designed to make life easier for
colonial elites and their successors after independence rather than to satisfy the needs of the indigenous poor and subaltern.
This issue draws attention to the fact that these processes have long been the subject of a community interested and active in development policy, and that a look in the historical rear-view mirror can help to raise awareness again of the diversity of attempts to understand, work on and solve the problem of urban development in the Global South before embarking on the next initiative. Historians are not among the main actors on
the development policy scene, which is dominated by practitioners trained in the social sciences, but they can contribute important insights on historical agency and the contextualization of the emergence and transformations of mega-cities, as the historiographical overview that the editors of this issue precede the contributions shows. Two aspects in particular are brought to the fore: the first concerns a series of problems related to the accommodation of such large numbers of people in extremely limited space, ranging from colonial segregation to social housing and the persistence of huge slums as the hallmark of modern cities in the Global South. Connected to the housing issue is the attention to the explosive social situation and the potential of political upheavals that lie in this concentration of people. Accordingly, a long tradition of planning fantasies can be traced, which were not only aimed at alleviating problems of the ever-growing cities in Asia, Latin America and Africa and avoiding their destabilizing effect for individual societies and the two opposite camps during the Cold War, but also at identifying lessons for urban planning in Europe and North America.
This “transnational turn” in the history of urban planning is about to replace an all too flat Eurocentrism, the failure of which can be observed by every visitor who approaches
the former colonial cities from the outside towards the centre. As a result, we now have at our disposal a larger number of studies that address the cities in the Global South and no longer take it for granted that solutions from the North will be realized in the South with a certain time lag, but that the cities between Sao Paulo and Maputo are independent socio-political equations and laboratories of original social and political movements. This provides a noteworthy analysis and a rich source of illustrative material, which challenges those development policies that formulate their “offers of help” without taking social realities sufficiently into account.
If we can currently observe a growing attention to strategies of resilience, which process the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the rapidly growing importance of the climate crisis for any societal strategy and the intensification of the attempts to decouple the USA and China, then it is appropriate to look at the mega-cities of the Global South, which, due to their long-lasting resource weakness, have for many decades had to pay much more attention to their vulnerability (and especially that of their socially weakest). The present issue is an invitation to familiarize oneself with the state of the art of research in an area whose significance is growing not only for Mexico City and Shanghai, but also for Paris with its banlieues in France or Saint Louis in the USA.
Comparativ, 2019
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/159
Editorial
With this issu... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/159
Editorial
With this issue we close the 29th year of a journal that owes its beginning to the special circumstances of the upheaval of 1989. Until autumn of this year, it was almost impossible to dream of founding an academic journal for Leipzig’s school of world history writing led by scholars like Walter Markov and Manfred Kossok, because real-socialism in its East German variant was characterized above all by inscrutable bureaucratic rules
that concealed the desired control over thoughts and concepts. True, the leading historical journal in the country, the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, was open not only to national history narratives and hosted also debates on the world historical importance of past events but this remained unsystematic and often heavily impacted by an orthodox understanding of Marxism-Leninism. The other review that could have become home for world history approaches, the journal “Asien-Afrika-Lateinamerika” founded in 1973 as successor to the Leipzig based yearbook of the same title, had developed into a place where contemporary issues and current political strategies of the GDR-government towards the so-called Third world dominated completely.
The only possibility to publish on a regular basis comparative historical research based upon case studies dealing with different world regions where small booklets appearing four times a year undercover as teaching material for university purposes. These “Leipziger Beiträge zur Revolutionsforschung” brought through the approval process in small print runs, were at least connected to a trunk of loyal readers, even if most of them thought twice during the transition to the new currency in 1990 whether the ideas published in Comparativ would now be worth West German money. Clemens Heller of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris stepped in and generously provided the cost of printing the first two issues as venture capital and also bought the first subscription in France.
An intellectual tradition of world historiography was to be continued, while at the same time the standards for writing history were subject to rapid change – locally and globally.
Some time passed before the journal took its place among the new journals of global history, and here is an opportunity to thank all the authors who entrusted us with their ideas for thematic issues and essays, although elsewhere it might have given them more reputation and fuel for a mainstream career. What has distinguished the magazine on the one hand and continues to do so today is a strong sense of community. But this community, contrary to many a grudging prediction, has not simply remained stable and slowly become “historical”, but has grown and changed. Since a memorable founding meeting in 2002, the European Network in Universal and Global History has been the institutional framework of this community and has been constantly changing and thoroughly rejuvenated in the course of numerous congresses on world and global history.
This thematic issue follows earlier attempts to provide an interim balance or at least some orientation along the way on what happens to the field of world and global history writing. In 1994, we asked for the first time in a thematic issue of Comparativ about the relationship between older world history and more recent global history, and the distinction has since found many supporters, but also variants of its justification. In an issue appearing in 2000 on skulls and bones as objects and subjects of a history of humanity we addressed the issue of the fundamental turn away from Eurocentrism in anthropology and world history writing.
In between we explored in the now 170 issues the many facets of the global with focus on social, cultural, political, economic histories as well as their spatial framing. In 2010, we devoted another themed issue to the then current trends in global history and observed with some surprise the double trend that global history has now become an empirical matter, expressed in dissertations, journal articles, and research monographs with a well-defined subject matter and corpus of sources, while at the same time „world history“ of classical coinage has not only survived in one or many volumes, but has experienced a true renaissance and has met with abundant demand. This boom is far from over. The appetite for a complete narrative of world history has rather increased
and it is no coincidence that this issue is mainly about one particular example, the Cambridge World History, which appeared in 2015 under the main responsibility of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We asked specialists from various epochs and approaches to discuss one volume each for us and tried to make an overall interpretation ourselves. The total of nine volumes do not make it easy to keep track of the whole, as they are a collective work of more than 200 authors. State of the art in a way, but also a collection of very individual manuscripts. Can trends and commonalities be read from them, or do we have to capitulate in the end to the diversity? The contributions in this issue seek to find an answer together. And perhaps a rudimentary analysis of the composition of this authorship will help us to understand what global
history confronts us in this narrative.
The Cambridge World History is evidently an important milestone in the development of the field, given already the wide dissemination and the high quality of the contributions
made to become a major reference in the classroom everywhere. But at the same time this is not the ultimate word global historians have to say. On the contrary, it is an invitation to take notice of the achieved level of scholarship in order to go beyond. Comparativ will continue to accompany historiography critically on this path and give space for innovative approaches.
Comparativ, 2019
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/158
In this issue we continue... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/158
In this issue we continue the critical reflection on respatializations of global historical periods of change and caesuras by turning to the events of “1989”. About thirty years later seems a particularly good point of time of doing so as more archival material becomes accessible and as a younger generation of historians enters the debate, which sees the conflicts and transformation in and around 1989 with greater distance compared to long-standing interpretations by participants. In this course, especially individual societies gained attention which experienced at that time fundamental transformations linked with transnational and transregional shifts and were thus “1989” entered collective memory as a global caesura. This raises the intriguing question of how and to
what extent these single memories have merged slowly into a common global memory of 1989, especially as we note at the same time a decreasing interest among scholars to actually consider the global character of that year and the changes it saw and initiated. In view of that the issue interprets on the one hand 1989 as “global moment” with a nuanced understanding what signifies such moments and provides on the other hands empirical evidence for Africa regarding both the deep embeddedness of the course of events in transregional process and international dynamics and constellations as well as to how this shaped recollections.
The introduction outlines criteria for what constitutes a global moment. These include firstly a synchronicity of socio-political upheavals and conflicts which can be observed in many places of the world. The many mutual observations and references to each other did not lead, however, to a diffusion of some central models, rather they initiated their idiosyncratic adaption and intensified intercultural transfer. Secondly, global moments exist not per se but interrelated dynamics have to be recognized and signified by contemporaries. Related to that, thirdly interpretations that highlight interconnectedness and world-changing shifts have to be anchored in collective consciousness and memory.
Therefore, two dimensions make global moments, entangled conflicts and transformathe fact that global interpretations of events can be forgotten or become less attractive than national or local interpretations at a later point of time when social and political circumstances change again.
Precisely this seems to happen currently in Africa in regard to the turbulent period around 1989. The proxy wars during the global cold war ended and initiated both social and political reorganisation in individual societies as well as a repositioning in the world at large as can be seen in the abandonment of nuclear weapons in South Africa
which took place in the context of an international debate about disarmament and was anchored transnational peace movements. This globality, however, receded to the background, it is less and less remembered while national and pan-African spaces are increasingly used as frames when 1989 is the topic. The global character of the African events that are an essential part of the global moment of 1989 give way to a regionalization of the memory of 1989, which might also take place in other world region right now or in
times to come. Does that mean that existing historical narratives have to be rewritten? At least the shifts in collective memory draws attention to a renegotiation of narratives and the hypotheses in this issue is that this concerns above all the long-time dominant narrative
of 1989 about a self-liberation of peoples and nations from Soviet dominance and the transformation to market economies and democratic systems. Throughout Eastern Europe – and beyond – its triumphant narrative of “Westernization” is confronted with realities that do not fit. This in turn, invites us to think about the afterlives of global moments when regionally embedded processes of creating meaning do not melt into one globally recognized powerful narrative. It seems that we are in the midst of a process where the collectives memories of 1989 diverge and turn into separate repositories of historical knowledge which reorganize past global connectedness according the specific
challenges societies are confronted with today.
Matthias Middell / Katja Naumann
Comparativ, 2019
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/157
Writing the history of co... more link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/157
Writing the history of containers – national, regional, or continental – looks rather outdated today. World and global histories search for connections between societies and for common features that characterize the development of such societies. But this exercise proves difficult for many reasons. One of them is a very practical challenge: to master the necessary languages to access both sources and specialized literature for more than a few societies quickly reaches its limits. Collective work of specialists with different regional expertise has become the attractive modus to overcome this difficulty. Another challenge is the fact that connections not only increase in number but also overlap and become confusing the larger the timespan investigated. A solution to this problem seems to be a focus on single years or decades. Consequently, the number of books dealing with “global years” and combing secondary literature for as many regions as possible to discover the links between them for a specific twelve-month period has increased since global history has become à la mode.
This often goes hand in hand with the assumption that this particular year is a caesura for more than one society and world region while revealing broader transformation of, for example, the international system – as is the case with the Seven Years’ War as the opening of the Anglo-French competition for worldwide hegemony or withthe two world wars of the twentieth century – or major revolutions – such as the American, the French, or the Russian ones in 1776, 1789, and 1917 respectively. A similar point of no return has obviously been 1989 as the end of a short twentieth century or the end of the Cold War. But other authors relativize the character of such a punctual caesura and use the concept of the “global year” to undermine the importance of another year. Such an approach occurred with studies on 1979 – with the parallel challenge to the two superpowers’ hegemony by the Iranian revolution and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan as well as by the election of the Polish pope and the opening of China’s economy – which is presented as similarly decisive as 1989.
For those who are not satisfied with the singular focus on one year, the next scale is obviously the decade. Once again, the growing number of books and even series addressing global change as taking place over a period of less than a dozen years demonstrates that such a framing also allows for productive cross-cultural studies. While the study of a year unquestionably privileges events over structures and processes, the decade as a preferred framework invites a more balanced view on events. This view uncovers the process of gaining global importance, which often only happens in retrospective when the departing processes become transparent for more than a few places and when we get access to material that allows the significance attributed to those events to be measured by the contemporaries and the first cohort of commentators. Only from this perspective are we able to apply a semi constructivist approach to global moments. Such moments obviously do not exist per se – but they are full of potential to be seen as such. But this potential has to be realized before we can call them global moments. Neither natural catastrophes nor pandemics and neither wars nor sensational technological innovations intrinsically constitute global moments. Actors are needed that make these moments important by loading them with meaning beyond the individual facts, therefore anchoring them in collective consciousness and memory.
Investigating a decade and its meaning for a world region, as is the case here with the sixties and Africa, contributes to a better understanding of such processes. It does not mean that it is a global moment, but it may be a moment full of potential to be absorbed into the collective memory of Africans, of pan-Africanists all over the world, of those seeking decolonization and independence, or of those interested in the establishment of new transregional ties or the new ways of integrating a region into world economy. But underlining the potential of a moment of global importance also invites a rethinking of the processes of forgetting. In the light of later development, the original powerful interpretation loses attractiveness or is consciously overwritten by other interpretations. Political independence has not led to economic sovereignty – the dreams connected to decolonization are in conflict with the ongoing neglect of recognition. Evidently, these traumata work on the collective perception of the sixties and have led to remembrance that differs from the original enthusiasm. But while a potential meaning has not necessarily materialized, the mechanism works the other way around as well: the meaning attributed to a historical period in the following decades can change later on again. Insofar, historiographical reconstruction, as provided in this thematic issue, is an invitation to reconsider the narratives that have become powerful.
Comparativ, 2019
link to complete issue: www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/156
With this issue, Comparativ inc... more link to complete issue: www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/156
With this issue, Comparativ includes three new features. Firstly, in a short intro the editors of the journal relate themes and arguments of the single issue to the wider programmatic concerns of Comparativ. Since its founding in 1991, the journal has published new research on world and global history at the crossroads of a wide range of area studies by means of thematic issues in which a selection of articles presents one topic from different and yet integrated angles. In this way, Comparativ serves to bring joint inquiries to the fore and provides a forum for collaborative studies on connections and comparisons along the many scales that have become relevant for the flows of past and present people, ideas and goods as well as for the ever renewed attempts to control such fluidity. Secondly, we complement our book review section with an annotation section that provides an increasing number of shorter summaries of newly released works. In doing so, we respond to the growing number of monographs and edited volumes that make it increasingly more difficult to gain an overview of, select and assign books for reviewing. Thirdly, Comparativ has been incorporated into the DOI system, which assigns persistent identifiers to the single article to increase the integration into as well as retrieval from digital databases and library catalogues.
This special issue presents global perspectives on empires and imperial constellations, which aim at feeding into the current lively discussion about the place of empires in world and global history as much as in the social sciences and history at large. This discussion reacts to a dual observation: On the one hand, and for a long time, social scientists and scholars from the humanities have taken for granted that the era of empire is over and done with and that historical development was a directed process “from nation-state to empire”. On the other hand, ‘empire’ was a frequently used trope in public debates about imperialist behaviour and in fact continues to be. Military interventions have been seen through this lens, and international organizations have been criticized for imperial(ist) politics while many one-to-one interstate relations also often appear as imperial in nature. The articles collected here somehow parallel the effort made by the authors in a book on empire and the social sciences recently edited by Jeremy Adelman (London: Bloomsbury 2019).
What we can learn from the recent interest in imperial histories is that we obviously miss an important part of modern history when reducing statehood to the national, which large parts of the social sciences do when remaining attached to the context of their foundation during the emergence of nation-states in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is particularly interesting since it is exactly the ambition of social sciences to find explanations at a world level and not only at national level. But to analyse societies and economies as national containers driven mainly by their internal tensions and contradictions is not enough to grasp the impact of border-transcending entanglements and connections that were to a large extent organized by empires. It is therefore no wonder that the renewed interest in imperial histories and imperialism – and the role social scientists played within this framework to make the empire work – went hand in hand with the rise of global histories since the 1990s.
But, of course, empires are not fixed entities either; they have seen as much transformation as other spatial formats. The empires of the Atlantic world are quite different from what imperialist behaviour today insists on calling an empire of the twenty-first century. A decisive turning point, so it seems to us, was the revolutionary period after 1776 when Europe as well as the Americas saw empires dissolving under the attacks of nationbuilders who ironically right from the beginning distinguished between new principles at home and the continuation of imperial features –including enslavement and other forms of coerced labour – in the colonies where citizenship was denied to the unfree.
This fundamental transformation, at the same time, secured the establishment of nationstates and the survival of empires so that a new spatial format emerged that can be called a nation-state with imperial extension. This hybrid format has seen a successful career at least until the times of decolonization. Success means that the most ambitious hegemonic powers of the world since the 1820s used this format to organize their positioning in the world and their ways of controlling global flows.
To study the variants of this format over time and space may help us to overcome the often lamented methodological nationalism, to overcome the simplistic opposition of Eurocentric and postcolonial perspectives and to better understand global integration as an asymmetric process.
None of these imperial configurations was able or even intending to integrate the whole world, instead integrating its very specific world of transregional linkages but never with a planetarian scope. Studying empires therefore can also be an invitation to understand global processes as the result of competing globalization projects instead of misinterpreting globalization as a natural process without alternatives. At the same time, we may better understand why resistance to global integration often uses the rhetoric of independence and sovereignty – given the imperial(ist) experience many people in the world had been confronted with.
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The transformation of East-Central Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union is often identified with serious changes in property relations and corresponding restructuring of societies, an increase in intra-societal inequality and an adaptation to the institutional structure of the West. The field of culture appears as a derived sector in which, on the one hand, the penetration of Western practices and norms is also stated, but on the other hand, the processing of subjective perceptions and the emotional reworking of the perceived injuries is localized. This also seems compatible with ideas in which culture, and especially its nationalized and nationalizing form, serves as the remaining bracket for socio-economically drifting apart societies. Such framings of culture seem to help explaining the conspicuous nationalism in East-Central Europe.
With its focus on cultural policy in East-Central Europe, this issue takes a different perspective, asking how the transformation of the cultural scene took place, how the understanding of culture and cultural policy changed, who initiated these changes and gained interpretive sovereignty over them, and how this kind of transformation in turn had an effect on the West, offering it a new kind of engagement with experiences of globalization, which were more or less accepted and used.
In doing so, the authors must confront an evident contradiction in the research litera- ture, in which some assume a diffusion of Western patterns, while others claim that, in contrast to the economy, the transformation in the cultural sphere followed entirely nati- onal traditions (with the interesting exception of the GDR, which was incorporated into the Federal Republic and had therefore no autonomous tradition to be followed). These astonishingly contradictory interpretations indicate that empirical evidence cannot be that far off, but rather that examples have so far been sought to illustrate preconceived interpretations. This is not surprising when one considers the enormous political charge that accompanies the interpretation of transformation, for each of these interpretations legitimizes a different policy in the present, for which the narrative shaping of the past forms the basis.
The same is true for the thematic field of cultural policy: an approach that not only con- nects the phenomena under investigation with a spatial format, very often the nation- state, but also takes into account the multi-scalar and interwoven situation under the global condition, is the main way out of this trap. Transformation cannot be understood solely as a transnational process or even as a global convergence, nor is it sufficient to move to the micro-level of the local and regional or to observe solely the regulation by national legislation and institutions. Cultural policy (like many other social dimensions, for that matter) is much more complexly spatialized and each of these dimensions fol- lows a different geography and different traditions and temporalities. As Thomas Höpel shows with the help of Polish and East German examples, this has completely opposite consequences for larger metropolises and for the countryside and smaller cities, the latter being much more dependent on subsidies from higher-level entities such as the state or the European Union or from landscapes of culture organized to sustain cultural infra- structures.
The course of the transformation is understood incompletely when taking its begin- ning as a zero hour in which everything starts anew as if on a tabula rasa and nothing remains as it was. On the contrary, many practices and institutional settings continued, were adapted to new social contexts or even became places of resistance against certain dimensions of the transformation - such as the Berlin Volksbühne, which Antje Dietze presents in her article.
The studies on Poland and Hungary provided by Przemysław Czapliński and Kristóf Nagy/Márton Szarvas again reveal a caesura at the nation-state level, which, after the state’s withdrawal from regulating the cultural sector since the mid-2010s, led to a new kind of interference in culture and even the intention to control it with instruments of censorship and positive discrimination against national conservative tendencies. Ho- wever, these efforts are by no means easy to impose, but come up against the cultural pre- ferences of the public and the orientation of a significant part of cultural actors towards international trends, which are reinforced by their integration into patterns of European cultural policy and, above all, by the presence of new media.
Thus, the example of cultural policy in Eastern Europe since 1989 proves to be a lesson in new approaches to transnational history that is not satisfied with stating cross-border interconnections (or observing nationalization as their opposite), but instead focuses attention on the diversity of new spatializations that can offer a key to understanding global processes.
Many approaches in the field of global history are based on the hypothesis that it is not so much the processes within societies that explain historical change, but rather the encounters and interactions between societies. This thesis is in conflict with Maximilien Robespierre’s famous doubt as to whether revolutions can be successfully exported or whether every society must wait for the moment when it is ready for radical change. Both positions have their supporters and the latter was not by chance emerging during the French revolution when the very concept of society in its national form was born. Since unanimity is not to be expected on this question, the pondering answer suggests itself that it all depends. But on what? And how can these factors be determined?
Heike Paul and her colleagues, who have contributed to this issue on re-education, have opted for a triangular constellation which, although obvious in previous research, has nevertheless been largely neglected. They compare the efforts of the US-military and administrators in Japan and Germany to initiate a society freed from fascism and on its way to democracy. But was the American presence only a supportive factor for already existing tendencies towards democratic behaviour and attitude or had the US-army to create something from scratch? How to conceptualize the project of re-education: in terms of a decided diffusion of values or as an impulse for the self-healing of a society ready for democratization after the collapse of the Nazi or the Tenno regimes?
Parallel processes such as the shaping of cultural relations between the (here primarily American) occupying power and the inhabitants and authorities of Japan and Germany as war-loser states can apparently be compared well in a global-historical setting. Thus, ideas about more general trends coalesce from case studies, which can then be matched with overarching explanations and narratives on macro processes. But the very different terms in which these relationships are described also point to the recalcitrance that the material shows towards this procedure. Why is it called in one (the German) case “re-education” and for the other (the Japanese) “democratization” and “modernization”? These terms indicate, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, a direction in which the process was conceived – returning or advancing to a desirable state. And that, in turn, says much more about the positioning of those who wanted to re-educate (or cure, as Richard Brickner suggested in his 1943 book “Is Germany incurable?”) or modernize, as it was thought in relation to Japan, which obviously had not yet had its future behind it as the Germans did with the Weimar Republic. The fact that rhetorical figures (and practices such as land dispossession on the island of Okinawa) of the civilizing mission
from colonial contexts were not far behind is shown by Akino Oshiro’s contribution on the transformation of Okinawa into a huge American military base. In the German context, it is rather the contradiction in the re-education policy between the goal of the greatest possible capacity for democracy and the distrust of incurable Germany that is expressed. The fact that this contradiction did not disappear with the occupying troops,
but continues to shape the debate on democracy in Germany to this day, is one of the legacies of the re-education period.
As contradictory as this period was, it cannot simply be reduced to a global moment with only slight variations in its manifestations in different places. Rather, we observe a wide spread of constellations that could be observed at about the same time at different ends of the Eurasian complex in confrontation with the USA, which had become the global power and the role-model for democracy. In this respect, the comparative procedure here
rather leads to the identification of considerable differences with some similarities on the surface of events and thus forms a barb to a history of linear progressive convergence through global processes.
Editorial:
The role of the slavery-based plantation economy in the development of capitalism has preoccupied many generations of scholars. This is related to a number of very important questions, the answers to which have a lasting impact on narratives about modernity and the ways it emerged in what is often called the early modern times. Was slavery-based production good for the initial accumulation of vast fortunes that became the precondition of modern capitalism, but ultimately incompatible with a capitalism based on the marketization of labour that is “freely” offered and demanded? Or did the history of slavery and other forms of forced and coerced labour, regardless of the moral scruples that became public for religious reasons (in England and the USA) or out of a predominantly
secular-humanist motivation (in France), accompany capitalism until the social counterforces of decolonization were strong enough to shake off this form of particularly crass exploitation (even if not inconsiderable remnants persist to this day)?
This fundamental debate, which provides a subject for an entire direction within current historiography, namely the New History of Capitalism, is now profiting from the enormous expansion of its empirical basis through the global-historical interest of the last three decades. It makes a difference whether one looks at the problem from the perspective of the one or the other empire. This was already clear to contemporaries who, in the famous renunciation of the slave trade at the Congress of Vienna, left a loophole for the Spanish and Portuguese, who were allowed to continue taking slaves on board south of the equator and transporting them to their colonial empire in South and Central America (which was, however, soon to shrink considerably). Napoleon had indeed burned his particularly republican-minded troop contingents in a vain attempt to restore slavery on Saint Domingue, but immediately after returning from his first exile on Elba he decreed the abolition of slavery. In between lay the dramatic defeat of the French against the English navy at Trafalgar and the sale of Louisiana to the USA: in view of the impossibility of asserting naval supremacy against the British competitor, there followed a provisional rejection of the Atlantic as the relevant space of expansion and geopolitical projection which implied a return to a different type of capitalism, based not on the trade ports on the coast but on agriculture and manufactures in the hinterland of metropolitan France. That this meant neither a definitive rejection of colonial projects nor of exploitation through forced labour by French elites was soon to become apparent in North Africa and later in Southeast Asia.
What was supposed to be exemplified here by the French case is made plausible by this thematic issue with many more examples: there is no one, universally valid answer to the question of the relationship between slavery and capitalism, but slavery and other forms of forced labour are part of the history of capitalism and cannot be excluded from its definition. What form this connection took, what consequences it had for the persistence of monocultures (and therefore impacting chances for diversified development afterwards and until today), and how it inscribed and continues to inscribe itself in the cultural patterns of societies that were based on slave labour to a huge extent varies and
invites a history of capitalisms in the plural.
Editorial
The topic of empire continues to keep the social sciences at large busy. After it had seemed for a long time as if the topic had definitely been handed over to historians, who are concerned with a past phenomenon that only occurs as a nostalgic reflex in the present, empires are suddenly also of interest again to the social scientists concerned with the present under quite different aspects. The question of whether the United States was and still is an empire and whether such imperial configurations were needed to maintain an international order after the multilateralism of the Cold War had come to an end played a crucial role in relaunching the debate about empires. A second layer of interest was informed by postcolonially inspired interest in the continuing mechanisms of earlier colonial empires now striking back in various ways and thus remaining present in today’s seemingly post-imperial world. At a third level, observations that view empires as a rather loose association of rule with unfinished territorialization came to the fore in interpretations of empire as a more appropriate form of governance under conditions of global or at least transregional weakening or even dissolution of boundaries.
While we recently looked back at the similarities and differences between empires for the historical period from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in a historically comparative thematic issue of this journal (no 3/2019), the current double issue, conceived from the perspective of historical sociology, is concerned with a geographically even broader comparison that seeks to revise the thesis of a European exceptionalism in the history of colonialism and imperialism that is often put forward implicitly rather than explicitly. This makes it necessary, first of all, to look for colonial imperial expansion also outside Europe and not to construct a “non-European world” as the target of expansion, as an overseas history, now out of fashion, did for a long time. This means not only to question the geography of comparative studies of empires, but also to reflect critically on their privileged time frame and to include examples that lie beyond the particular European expansion period that is often portrayed as starting in the fifteenth century. In a third level, the nesting of empires is at stake, because the confrontation with imperial conquest from outside by no means put an end to state-building processes inside the imperially overformed regions, from which a whole complex of new questions about the relationship of the various empire-building processes can be derived.
Colonialism, in this perspective, is not a relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans, but a much broader, almost universal kaleidoscope of subjugation, settlement into regions other than the one of origin, and arrangements between external and internal elites. What distinguishes pre-modern forms of imperial rule and colony-building from those since the late eighteenth century, however, are (1) their positioning in struggles for dominance at a global scale, (2) the complicated blending between the formation of nation-states and ongoing attempts at imperial expansion, which can by no means be reduced to a teleology from empire to nation, and (3) the relationship between capitalist adventurism and political projects of empire building, which follow different logics but always interact.
To abstract these processes in such a way that they can be made available as theoretical elements to other disciplines requires at the same time a wide range of expertise for many case studies, an important selection of which is brought together in this issue. Specialists will read these case studies as enriching knowledge about individual empires, while the thematic issue as a whole, not least with its introduction by the editors and its afterword by Frederick Cooper, pursues an ambition that goes beyond the individual case and at the same time offers a broadening of perspective beyond meticulously deconstructed European exceptionalism and a contribution to a general theory of empires.
Editorial
Global history has achieved its impressive progress not least by suggesting intellectual entanglements between previously little connected fields of research. The present issue is a further example of this successful strategy. The editors have succeeded in bringing together specialists in the history of development with the young field of global urban history and putting them into a fruitful dialogue. The history of development has a long tradition, but it has often been concerned with the involvement of international organizations, national frameworks, or the imperial constellations of metropolis and (former) colony.
It is by no means a new insight that urbanization is not only a sign of “development” but also poses enormous challenges to exactly this development. With an accuracy that is impressive at first glance, statisticians announced some years ago that the time had come when more people would live in cities than in the countryside. This statement was visualized with two intersecting trend lines, so that everyone can see that this tendency will linearly expand into the future – reversal is out of the question. But what does it mean to live in a city? Do seemingly unambiguous conventions calculate that every community of more than 2000 inhabitants should be called a city (as the French administration assumes) or that one should orientate oneself by historically grown city law (as in the German case)? Obviously not, because the cities of the Global South, be they of megalomaniacal proportions or just average greetings, obviously do not follow such criteria from European historical tradition. They do not grow restricted by planning law and cadastre, but rather proliferate into a surrounding area that is difficult to delimit;
people change, whatever the above-mentioned statistics suggest about their stationary way of life, back and forth between city and countryside, sometimes daily, sometimes
seasonally. Urban infrastructures can hardly keep up with such fluidity, quite apart from the fact that they often have colonial origins and were designed to make life easier for
colonial elites and their successors after independence rather than to satisfy the needs of the indigenous poor and subaltern.
This issue draws attention to the fact that these processes have long been the subject of a community interested and active in development policy, and that a look in the historical rear-view mirror can help to raise awareness again of the diversity of attempts to understand, work on and solve the problem of urban development in the Global South before embarking on the next initiative. Historians are not among the main actors on
the development policy scene, which is dominated by practitioners trained in the social sciences, but they can contribute important insights on historical agency and the contextualization of the emergence and transformations of mega-cities, as the historiographical overview that the editors of this issue precede the contributions shows. Two aspects in particular are brought to the fore: the first concerns a series of problems related to the accommodation of such large numbers of people in extremely limited space, ranging from colonial segregation to social housing and the persistence of huge slums as the hallmark of modern cities in the Global South. Connected to the housing issue is the attention to the explosive social situation and the potential of political upheavals that lie in this concentration of people. Accordingly, a long tradition of planning fantasies can be traced, which were not only aimed at alleviating problems of the ever-growing cities in Asia, Latin America and Africa and avoiding their destabilizing effect for individual societies and the two opposite camps during the Cold War, but also at identifying lessons for urban planning in Europe and North America.
This “transnational turn” in the history of urban planning is about to replace an all too flat Eurocentrism, the failure of which can be observed by every visitor who approaches
the former colonial cities from the outside towards the centre. As a result, we now have at our disposal a larger number of studies that address the cities in the Global South and no longer take it for granted that solutions from the North will be realized in the South with a certain time lag, but that the cities between Sao Paulo and Maputo are independent socio-political equations and laboratories of original social and political movements. This provides a noteworthy analysis and a rich source of illustrative material, which challenges those development policies that formulate their “offers of help” without taking social realities sufficiently into account.
If we can currently observe a growing attention to strategies of resilience, which process the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the rapidly growing importance of the climate crisis for any societal strategy and the intensification of the attempts to decouple the USA and China, then it is appropriate to look at the mega-cities of the Global South, which, due to their long-lasting resource weakness, have for many decades had to pay much more attention to their vulnerability (and especially that of their socially weakest). The present issue is an invitation to familiarize oneself with the state of the art of research in an area whose significance is growing not only for Mexico City and Shanghai, but also for Paris with its banlieues in France or Saint Louis in the USA.
Editorial
With this issue we close the 29th year of a journal that owes its beginning to the special circumstances of the upheaval of 1989. Until autumn of this year, it was almost impossible to dream of founding an academic journal for Leipzig’s school of world history writing led by scholars like Walter Markov and Manfred Kossok, because real-socialism in its East German variant was characterized above all by inscrutable bureaucratic rules
that concealed the desired control over thoughts and concepts. True, the leading historical journal in the country, the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, was open not only to national history narratives and hosted also debates on the world historical importance of past events but this remained unsystematic and often heavily impacted by an orthodox understanding of Marxism-Leninism. The other review that could have become home for world history approaches, the journal “Asien-Afrika-Lateinamerika” founded in 1973 as successor to the Leipzig based yearbook of the same title, had developed into a place where contemporary issues and current political strategies of the GDR-government towards the so-called Third world dominated completely.
The only possibility to publish on a regular basis comparative historical research based upon case studies dealing with different world regions where small booklets appearing four times a year undercover as teaching material for university purposes. These “Leipziger Beiträge zur Revolutionsforschung” brought through the approval process in small print runs, were at least connected to a trunk of loyal readers, even if most of them thought twice during the transition to the new currency in 1990 whether the ideas published in Comparativ would now be worth West German money. Clemens Heller of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris stepped in and generously provided the cost of printing the first two issues as venture capital and also bought the first subscription in France.
An intellectual tradition of world historiography was to be continued, while at the same time the standards for writing history were subject to rapid change – locally and globally.
Some time passed before the journal took its place among the new journals of global history, and here is an opportunity to thank all the authors who entrusted us with their ideas for thematic issues and essays, although elsewhere it might have given them more reputation and fuel for a mainstream career. What has distinguished the magazine on the one hand and continues to do so today is a strong sense of community. But this community, contrary to many a grudging prediction, has not simply remained stable and slowly become “historical”, but has grown and changed. Since a memorable founding meeting in 2002, the European Network in Universal and Global History has been the institutional framework of this community and has been constantly changing and thoroughly rejuvenated in the course of numerous congresses on world and global history.
This thematic issue follows earlier attempts to provide an interim balance or at least some orientation along the way on what happens to the field of world and global history writing. In 1994, we asked for the first time in a thematic issue of Comparativ about the relationship between older world history and more recent global history, and the distinction has since found many supporters, but also variants of its justification. In an issue appearing in 2000 on skulls and bones as objects and subjects of a history of humanity we addressed the issue of the fundamental turn away from Eurocentrism in anthropology and world history writing.
In between we explored in the now 170 issues the many facets of the global with focus on social, cultural, political, economic histories as well as their spatial framing. In 2010, we devoted another themed issue to the then current trends in global history and observed with some surprise the double trend that global history has now become an empirical matter, expressed in dissertations, journal articles, and research monographs with a well-defined subject matter and corpus of sources, while at the same time „world history“ of classical coinage has not only survived in one or many volumes, but has experienced a true renaissance and has met with abundant demand. This boom is far from over. The appetite for a complete narrative of world history has rather increased
and it is no coincidence that this issue is mainly about one particular example, the Cambridge World History, which appeared in 2015 under the main responsibility of Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We asked specialists from various epochs and approaches to discuss one volume each for us and tried to make an overall interpretation ourselves. The total of nine volumes do not make it easy to keep track of the whole, as they are a collective work of more than 200 authors. State of the art in a way, but also a collection of very individual manuscripts. Can trends and commonalities be read from them, or do we have to capitulate in the end to the diversity? The contributions in this issue seek to find an answer together. And perhaps a rudimentary analysis of the composition of this authorship will help us to understand what global
history confronts us in this narrative.
The Cambridge World History is evidently an important milestone in the development of the field, given already the wide dissemination and the high quality of the contributions
made to become a major reference in the classroom everywhere. But at the same time this is not the ultimate word global historians have to say. On the contrary, it is an invitation to take notice of the achieved level of scholarship in order to go beyond. Comparativ will continue to accompany historiography critically on this path and give space for innovative approaches.
In this issue we continue the critical reflection on respatializations of global historical periods of change and caesuras by turning to the events of “1989”. About thirty years later seems a particularly good point of time of doing so as more archival material becomes accessible and as a younger generation of historians enters the debate, which sees the conflicts and transformation in and around 1989 with greater distance compared to long-standing interpretations by participants. In this course, especially individual societies gained attention which experienced at that time fundamental transformations linked with transnational and transregional shifts and were thus “1989” entered collective memory as a global caesura. This raises the intriguing question of how and to
what extent these single memories have merged slowly into a common global memory of 1989, especially as we note at the same time a decreasing interest among scholars to actually consider the global character of that year and the changes it saw and initiated. In view of that the issue interprets on the one hand 1989 as “global moment” with a nuanced understanding what signifies such moments and provides on the other hands empirical evidence for Africa regarding both the deep embeddedness of the course of events in transregional process and international dynamics and constellations as well as to how this shaped recollections.
The introduction outlines criteria for what constitutes a global moment. These include firstly a synchronicity of socio-political upheavals and conflicts which can be observed in many places of the world. The many mutual observations and references to each other did not lead, however, to a diffusion of some central models, rather they initiated their idiosyncratic adaption and intensified intercultural transfer. Secondly, global moments exist not per se but interrelated dynamics have to be recognized and signified by contemporaries. Related to that, thirdly interpretations that highlight interconnectedness and world-changing shifts have to be anchored in collective consciousness and memory.
Therefore, two dimensions make global moments, entangled conflicts and transformathe fact that global interpretations of events can be forgotten or become less attractive than national or local interpretations at a later point of time when social and political circumstances change again.
Precisely this seems to happen currently in Africa in regard to the turbulent period around 1989. The proxy wars during the global cold war ended and initiated both social and political reorganisation in individual societies as well as a repositioning in the world at large as can be seen in the abandonment of nuclear weapons in South Africa
which took place in the context of an international debate about disarmament and was anchored transnational peace movements. This globality, however, receded to the background, it is less and less remembered while national and pan-African spaces are increasingly used as frames when 1989 is the topic. The global character of the African events that are an essential part of the global moment of 1989 give way to a regionalization of the memory of 1989, which might also take place in other world region right now or in
times to come. Does that mean that existing historical narratives have to be rewritten? At least the shifts in collective memory draws attention to a renegotiation of narratives and the hypotheses in this issue is that this concerns above all the long-time dominant narrative
of 1989 about a self-liberation of peoples and nations from Soviet dominance and the transformation to market economies and democratic systems. Throughout Eastern Europe – and beyond – its triumphant narrative of “Westernization” is confronted with realities that do not fit. This in turn, invites us to think about the afterlives of global moments when regionally embedded processes of creating meaning do not melt into one globally recognized powerful narrative. It seems that we are in the midst of a process where the collectives memories of 1989 diverge and turn into separate repositories of historical knowledge which reorganize past global connectedness according the specific
challenges societies are confronted with today.
Matthias Middell / Katja Naumann
Writing the history of containers – national, regional, or continental – looks rather outdated today. World and global histories search for connections between societies and for common features that characterize the development of such societies. But this exercise proves difficult for many reasons. One of them is a very practical challenge: to master the necessary languages to access both sources and specialized literature for more than a few societies quickly reaches its limits. Collective work of specialists with different regional expertise has become the attractive modus to overcome this difficulty. Another challenge is the fact that connections not only increase in number but also overlap and become confusing the larger the timespan investigated. A solution to this problem seems to be a focus on single years or decades. Consequently, the number of books dealing with “global years” and combing secondary literature for as many regions as possible to discover the links between them for a specific twelve-month period has increased since global history has become à la mode.
This often goes hand in hand with the assumption that this particular year is a caesura for more than one society and world region while revealing broader transformation of, for example, the international system – as is the case with the Seven Years’ War as the opening of the Anglo-French competition for worldwide hegemony or withthe two world wars of the twentieth century – or major revolutions – such as the American, the French, or the Russian ones in 1776, 1789, and 1917 respectively. A similar point of no return has obviously been 1989 as the end of a short twentieth century or the end of the Cold War. But other authors relativize the character of such a punctual caesura and use the concept of the “global year” to undermine the importance of another year. Such an approach occurred with studies on 1979 – with the parallel challenge to the two superpowers’ hegemony by the Iranian revolution and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan as well as by the election of the Polish pope and the opening of China’s economy – which is presented as similarly decisive as 1989.
For those who are not satisfied with the singular focus on one year, the next scale is obviously the decade. Once again, the growing number of books and even series addressing global change as taking place over a period of less than a dozen years demonstrates that such a framing also allows for productive cross-cultural studies. While the study of a year unquestionably privileges events over structures and processes, the decade as a preferred framework invites a more balanced view on events. This view uncovers the process of gaining global importance, which often only happens in retrospective when the departing processes become transparent for more than a few places and when we get access to material that allows the significance attributed to those events to be measured by the contemporaries and the first cohort of commentators. Only from this perspective are we able to apply a semi constructivist approach to global moments. Such moments obviously do not exist per se – but they are full of potential to be seen as such. But this potential has to be realized before we can call them global moments. Neither natural catastrophes nor pandemics and neither wars nor sensational technological innovations intrinsically constitute global moments. Actors are needed that make these moments important by loading them with meaning beyond the individual facts, therefore anchoring them in collective consciousness and memory.
Investigating a decade and its meaning for a world region, as is the case here with the sixties and Africa, contributes to a better understanding of such processes. It does not mean that it is a global moment, but it may be a moment full of potential to be absorbed into the collective memory of Africans, of pan-Africanists all over the world, of those seeking decolonization and independence, or of those interested in the establishment of new transregional ties or the new ways of integrating a region into world economy. But underlining the potential of a moment of global importance also invites a rethinking of the processes of forgetting. In the light of later development, the original powerful interpretation loses attractiveness or is consciously overwritten by other interpretations. Political independence has not led to economic sovereignty – the dreams connected to decolonization are in conflict with the ongoing neglect of recognition. Evidently, these traumata work on the collective perception of the sixties and have led to remembrance that differs from the original enthusiasm. But while a potential meaning has not necessarily materialized, the mechanism works the other way around as well: the meaning attributed to a historical period in the following decades can change later on again. Insofar, historiographical reconstruction, as provided in this thematic issue, is an invitation to reconsider the narratives that have become powerful.
With this issue, Comparativ includes three new features. Firstly, in a short intro the editors of the journal relate themes and arguments of the single issue to the wider programmatic concerns of Comparativ. Since its founding in 1991, the journal has published new research on world and global history at the crossroads of a wide range of area studies by means of thematic issues in which a selection of articles presents one topic from different and yet integrated angles. In this way, Comparativ serves to bring joint inquiries to the fore and provides a forum for collaborative studies on connections and comparisons along the many scales that have become relevant for the flows of past and present people, ideas and goods as well as for the ever renewed attempts to control such fluidity. Secondly, we complement our book review section with an annotation section that provides an increasing number of shorter summaries of newly released works. In doing so, we respond to the growing number of monographs and edited volumes that make it increasingly more difficult to gain an overview of, select and assign books for reviewing. Thirdly, Comparativ has been incorporated into the DOI system, which assigns persistent identifiers to the single article to increase the integration into as well as retrieval from digital databases and library catalogues.
This special issue presents global perspectives on empires and imperial constellations, which aim at feeding into the current lively discussion about the place of empires in world and global history as much as in the social sciences and history at large. This discussion reacts to a dual observation: On the one hand, and for a long time, social scientists and scholars from the humanities have taken for granted that the era of empire is over and done with and that historical development was a directed process “from nation-state to empire”. On the other hand, ‘empire’ was a frequently used trope in public debates about imperialist behaviour and in fact continues to be. Military interventions have been seen through this lens, and international organizations have been criticized for imperial(ist) politics while many one-to-one interstate relations also often appear as imperial in nature. The articles collected here somehow parallel the effort made by the authors in a book on empire and the social sciences recently edited by Jeremy Adelman (London: Bloomsbury 2019).
What we can learn from the recent interest in imperial histories is that we obviously miss an important part of modern history when reducing statehood to the national, which large parts of the social sciences do when remaining attached to the context of their foundation during the emergence of nation-states in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is particularly interesting since it is exactly the ambition of social sciences to find explanations at a world level and not only at national level. But to analyse societies and economies as national containers driven mainly by their internal tensions and contradictions is not enough to grasp the impact of border-transcending entanglements and connections that were to a large extent organized by empires. It is therefore no wonder that the renewed interest in imperial histories and imperialism – and the role social scientists played within this framework to make the empire work – went hand in hand with the rise of global histories since the 1990s.
But, of course, empires are not fixed entities either; they have seen as much transformation as other spatial formats. The empires of the Atlantic world are quite different from what imperialist behaviour today insists on calling an empire of the twenty-first century. A decisive turning point, so it seems to us, was the revolutionary period after 1776 when Europe as well as the Americas saw empires dissolving under the attacks of nationbuilders who ironically right from the beginning distinguished between new principles at home and the continuation of imperial features –including enslavement and other forms of coerced labour – in the colonies where citizenship was denied to the unfree.
This fundamental transformation, at the same time, secured the establishment of nationstates and the survival of empires so that a new spatial format emerged that can be called a nation-state with imperial extension. This hybrid format has seen a successful career at least until the times of decolonization. Success means that the most ambitious hegemonic powers of the world since the 1820s used this format to organize their positioning in the world and their ways of controlling global flows.
To study the variants of this format over time and space may help us to overcome the often lamented methodological nationalism, to overcome the simplistic opposition of Eurocentric and postcolonial perspectives and to better understand global integration as an asymmetric process.
None of these imperial configurations was able or even intending to integrate the whole world, instead integrating its very specific world of transregional linkages but never with a planetarian scope. Studying empires therefore can also be an invitation to understand global processes as the result of competing globalization projects instead of misinterpreting globalization as a natural process without alternatives. At the same time, we may better understand why resistance to global integration often uses the rhetoric of independence and sovereignty – given the imperial(ist) experience many people in the world had been confronted with.