澳洲历史专业essay代写服务

摘要

相对于国家历史的处理方式，全球历史回应社会的文化及精神需求，社会和文化之间有了更多的内在联系。在一个加速全球化时代，全球历史是回顾我们过去的合理方式，使学科地方化。对于欧洲的历史学家们，全球史提供了一种有效的嵌入式处理方式，相对丰富了他们的观点，及时当他们和欧洲历史学家们一样继续工作，他们也不打算成为世界历史学家。
 

很多例子都显示出全球历史开始新兴，正如介于历史和其邻近学科的合作新模式领域，特别是社会科学，可以在新方式中呈现。全球历史在综合结构和大型进程的利益的复兴，它提高了对历史的分析力度，将其作为一门学科。同时，它也出现了一些不能解决的问题。截然不同的论述和研究通常在“全球史”这样的标题下混为一谈。其中四种将做以下考虑。
 

ABSTRACT
 

In contrast to national historical approaches, global history responds to the cultural and intellectual needs of communities, societies and cultures which are increasingly interconnected. Global history is an appropriate way of looking to “our past”, in an era of accelerated globalization, helping to “de-provincialize” the discipline. For historians of Europe, global history approaches offer a useful ground for embedding, relativizing and enriching their views and perspectives, even when they continue to work as historians of Europe and do not contemplate to become global historians.
 

As many examples show, global history is emerging as a field in which new forms of cooperation between history and the neighbouring disciplines, particularly the social sciences, can be practiced in new ways. Global history revives the interest in comprehensive structures and large-scale processes; it enhances the analytical power of history as a discipline. It also raises several problems which are not yet resolved. Very different types of discourses and studies are usually lumped together under the heading of “global history”, four of them are here considered.
 

KEYWORDS: global history; historiography; historical research; new historical trends;
 

ONE 
 

In the way they talk about history, historians are influenced by their specific experience, regional and cultural background, professional profile and expertise. Although my work has transnational dimensions with much interest for large-scale comparison, I am basically a historian of Europe with emphasis on Germany and the modern period. Please keep this in mind while you consider my comments on global history.

 

TWO 
 

History as a scholarly discipline was never restricted to the national level. Local and regional history have always been strong. Historians have traditionally studied ideas, religion, commerce and many other areas of transnational or transregional scope. There are important traditions of world history in several parts of the world, dating back to Herodot and Polybios, Sima Quian or Ibn Khaldun. Or think of Otto Hintze, Fernand Braudel and Eric Hobsbawm, famous historians of the 20th century who produced remarkable works with a transnational approach.
 

Still, ever since the early 19th century, when history began to emerge (in Europe) as a specialized, professionalized discipline, national historical approaches moved to the foreground. The rise of history as a professional discipline in the universities, schools and public space was part of cultural nation-building. The rise of history as a mass discipline was supported by the emerging or self-empowering nation states, while historians interpreted the relationship between the past, the present and the future in ways conducive to the formation and affirmation of national identities. The methodological principles of the profession, which became standardized and powerful in the same period of time, predisposed historians for this national function: Historians learned to base their studies on primary sources, especially in archives organized by the states; they privileged texts over other sources, which made the knowledge of language indispensable and limited the reach of historical research; they were obliged to take contexts serious and study them closely; they were trained to aim at time-specific and space-specific descriptions, explanations and interpretations, and not for the type of broad generalizations favoured by the natural scientists and some in the slowly rising social sciences.
 

In this formative period – the 19th century for the West – the public functions and the methodological characteristics of history as a discipline re-enforced each other and prepared the way for the relative dominance of national-historical approaches.
 

This did not necessarily mean that historians were nationalists (though many of them were). Nor did it mean that all historians wrote comprehensive histories of the countries in which they lived (most historians did not, but concentrated on more specific topics). But it meant that the intellectual maps which historians used for placing and framing their topics were increasingly structured by differences between national cultures and borders between nation states. It also meant that most historians focused on and regarded themselves as competent in specific national histories (and not others), frequently (but not necessarily) the national historical contexts of their own countries. This was particularly true for those historians who played roles as public intellectuals since the textbooks which they could try to influence, and the debates in which they engaged, were primarily informed by national-cultural contexts defined by language, shared communication, common beliefs and national institutions.
 

Of course, the world has changed much since the 19th century. Nationalism has led to catastrophe, historians have become less nationalistic, history was thoroughly diversified; comparative, micro, regional, ethnic, analytical approaches have gained ground. The old alliance between history as a discipline and the nation state has been loosened. On the other hand, much has survived of the classical historical paradigm, both in the methods and the public functions of historians, spreading throughout the world, changing on the way and becoming highly varied, but still with impressive continuity. As a consequence – due to good and bad reasons –, national historical views and approaches continue to weigh heavily in our profession, and in some parts of the world they are even dominant.

 

THREE 
 

This is, I believe, the background that has made global history so attractive since the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the concept “global history” started to be used, when global or world historical journals and associations were founded, and when a lively programmatic debate was brought on the way slowly followed by substantial research and empirical literature with a global-historical reach.
 

Very different types of discourses and studies are usually lumped together under the heading of “global history”. Let me distinguish four of them, following Conrad et al. (2007).
 

First, there is a new interest in the history of the world economy, moving beyond the old “world system approach” as practiced by Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s and 80s. The debate about the “Great Divergence” is perhaps the best known example. It deals with the question of whether and why the economic developments of China's Yangtse Delta region and North Western Europe were roughly similar over the centuries (with perhaps a small Chinese lead), while the Industrial Revolution dramatically changed the relation between both regions since the 18th century, with England and other parts of Europe taking off and China stagnating. Pomeranz (2000) tried to give an answer. According to him, the emerging gap was owed less to internal developments of the English economy, but more to external conditions. “Forces outside the market and conjunctures beyond Europe deserve a central place in explaining why Western Europe's otherwise largely unexceptional core achieved unique breakthroughs and wound up as the privileged centre of the 19th century's new world economy.”
 

Second, historical analyses of civilizations have experienced a remarkable come-back, more than a hundred years after Buckle, Danilevsky and Toynbee. Here historically minded social scientists play a role, but so do historians. I am thinking of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations”, but even more so of Shmuel Eisenstadt's theory of “multiple modernities” which can be seen as an alternative both to Huntington and to classical modernization theory in that it explicitly emphasizes the equal rights of different historical developments in different regions of the world, rejecting the idea of Europe or the West as being a superior model to which all other experiences are compared. There is much controversial debate about the “multiple modernities” approach, but historians have picked up its concepts and its spirit, e.g. Tu Wei-ming in his studies about Confucianism and a particular Chinese way into modernity. This discussion about modernities instead of modernization invites broad comparisons, but even more so the search for interaction between different civilizations and different religions. This way the units of analysis – civilizations – are handled as units with perforated, fluid borders and as parts of a larger whole (which, in itself, is not really theorized). The search for interaction and exchanges has become central for this and many other types of global history.