1 HAP Revision - Global & Transnational History Past Paper Questions - Part I Does globalization demand a 'global turn' on the part of historians? (2014) Is World History necessarily 'big history'? (2015) Why has global history become so appealing? (2016) How can we write a global history of a single place? (2017) Past Paper Questions - Part II How has globalization changed the practice of history? (2013) 'We are all now World historians.' Discuss. (2014) 'World history is an impossibility.' Discuss. (2015) Has transnational history supplanted imperial history? (2016) 'It is easier to write the transnational history of a product than of a person or of a process.' Discuss. (2017) Themes - Globalisation as a historical process and its effects on societies across the world - can we locate its origins and date it? - World history as a historiographical methodology and its impact on writing history as a framework of analysis - The emergence of transnational history from its roots in international history/ the history of foreign affairs/ imperial history in the post-colonial and post-modernist scholarly environment - The methodology of transnational history and its areas of focus Historiography - Most agreeable definition: Global History is an approach to the past that is non- Eurocentric and focussed on long-distance connectivity across national and cultural boundaries - Previous historiography, Much of the 'world history' taught in schools and universities has aided the 'return of nation and empire' in curricula in several countries, including Britain, France, and Turkey -> The rise of the USA, European decolonisation, and the relative decline of Europe itself have inevitably dominated this story - Richard Drayton, The historiography of the West's relationship with the rest of the world: The narrative of the past of imperialism has powerfully shaped what both political elites and the wider civil society conceive to be possible and desirable aims - Edward W. Said, Oriental backwardness as opposed to Western knowledge i.e. imaginative geographic, social, ethnic (physiological and moral characteristics were used in classifications), cultural, and mental boundaries: Orientalism is the generic term employed to describe the Western approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was approached systematically, as a topic of learning,
2 discovery, and practice -> The feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength - the Orient was silent/ a passive reactor in the writing of Orientalist literature - The biological bases of racial inequality: Racial classifications found in Robert Knox's The Dark Races of Man found a willing partner in latent Orientalism - Hannah Arendt, Racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics - National history in the present day, World history teaching remains dominated by narratives of nation states evolving since antiquity i.e. national histories exuding a faintly triumphal tone (exceptionalism) still rule the roost in Western Europe and the USA - William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (1963), An encompassing view of the planetary past composed of civilisational blocs competing for