The Prospect of Global History offers a new approach to the study of history, looking at the subject across a greater chronological range and seeking perspectives from sources beyond conventional European narratives.

The first comprehensive global history of the discipline of paleopathology

The first comprehensive overview of the innovative new discipline of global history Until very recently, historians have looked at the past with the tools of the nineteenth century. But globalization has fundamentally altered our ways of knowing, and it is no longer possible to study nations in isolation or to understand world history as emanating from the West. This book reveals why the discipline of global history has emerged as the most dynamic and innovative field in history—one that takes the connectedness of the world as its point of departure, and that poses a fundamental challenge to the premises and methods of history as we know it. What Is Global History? provides a comprehensive overview of this exciting new approach to history. The book addresses some of the biggest questions the discipline will face in the twenty-first century: How does global history differ from other interpretations of world history? How do we write a global history that is not Eurocentric yet does not fall into the trap of creating new centrisms? How can historians compare different societies and establish compatibility across space? What are the politics of global history? This in-depth and accessible book also explores the limits of the new paradigm and even its dangers, the question of whom global history should be written for, and much more. Written by a leading expert in the field, What Is Global History? shows how, by understanding the world's past as an integrated whole, historians can remap the terrain of their discipline for our globalized present.

In this work, Jurgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson make the case that globalization is not so new, after all. Arguing that the world did not turn "global" overnight, the book traces the emergence of globalization over the past seven or eight centuries. In fact, the authors write, the phenomenon can be traced back to early modern large-scale trading, for example, the silk trade between China and the Mediterranean region, the shipping routes between the Arabian Peninsula and India, and the more frequently travelled caravan routes of the Near East and North Africa, all conduits for people, goods, coins, artwork, and ideas.

Nathaniel Millett examines how the Prospect Bluff maroons constructed their freedom, shedding light on the extent to which they could fight physically and intellectually to claim their rights. Millett considers the legacy of the Haitian Revolution, the growing influence of abolitionism, and the period’s changing interpretations of race, freedom, and citizenship among whites, blacks, and Native Americans.

This short book offers a clear and engaging introduction to the history of humankind, from the earliest movements of people to the contemporary epoch of globalization. Cowen traces this complex history in a manner which offers both a compelling narrative and an analytical and comparative treatment. Drawing on a new perspective on global history, he traces the intersection of change in economics, politics and human beliefs, examining the formation, enlargement and limits of human societies. Global History shows how much of human history encompasses three intersecting forces - trading networks, expanding political empires and crusading creeds. Abandoning the limits of a Eurocentric view of the world, the book offers a number of fresh insights. Its periodization embraces movement across continents and across the millennia. The indigenous American civilizations are included, for instance. The book also ranges over the early civilizations of China and Europe as well as the Russian and Islamic worlds. Modern American and Japanese civilizations are, in addition, a focus for attention. The author examines national and regional histories in relation to wider themes, sequences and global tendencies. In conclusion, he seeks to address the question of the extent to which a global society is beginning to crystallize.

As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle’s chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards. Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism. Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.