Who’s Global History?
Reflections on the ‘Writing India into Global History’ Workshop at MWF-Delhi
On February 26th, 2024, the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF-Delhi) hosted a workshop on “Writing India into Global History,” where the keynote speaker was global historian Prof. Sebastian Conrad. Scholars attending the workshop were concerned with non-Western experiences of writing global history with a particular focus on India.
In this blog post, I will reflect on this theme and discuss my experience attending the workshop as an intern at the MWF Delhi and a current MA student at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies.
A point of departure is two pieces of literature written by Prof. Conrad, What is Global History? (2016). This monograph is an interesting addition to the field. Building on the work of prominent scholars such as John Darwin, David Armitage and Sven Beckert, Sebastian Conrad's novel approach is to position the global “not as an object of study but, as a particular perspective” with a special emphasis on “global integration or structured transformations on a global level” (Conrad 2017, 62). He emphasises that global history is not a history of globalisation, but seeks to understand the extent to which world societies and regions were integrated into global systems. His idea of integration extends beyond connection.
To illustrate his perspective, Prof. Conrad offered a brilliant example during the workshop on the social history of ideas in a global context. In the early twentieth century, the ideas of Karl Marx and others traveled from London to Saigon and were absorbed by Vietnamese workers. Rather than a diffusion of ideas out of Europe, the globality arose from a comparable context in which working people realised their class consciousness and contemporary situations (see MWF DELHI 2024). In this case, the integration of knowledge transcended national boundaries.
This awareness of why a certain space and its actors finds a particular object of knowledge interesting rather than where it originates seems to me to be a crucial methodological-intellectual base for his approach to Global History.
Prof. Conrad’s understanding of global history reflects on the histories of past nation-states and explores connections between unexpected parallels of ontological spaces across the world, considering the reflection of geopolitical ties and the sense of history, experiences and marginalisation in the broader global history as a material anchor.
In his talk, he reflected upon issues of Western centrism and Eurocentrism in academic and historical studies. During another discussion in New Delhi, Prof. Conrad also mentioned that global history provides a space for historians to become critical global citizens in addition to being an alternative approach to history.
The kind of global history offer by Sebastian Conrad is not without its critics. He has been accused of providing an “oversimplified portrayal of these various perspectives to bolster his vision” (Willoughby, 2017). There is also a deep unease about the notion that the Anglo-American world was a forerunner of global history and thus left no room for the development of global histories in Asia, Latin America or Africa. The language we use to write global history tends to be English, which is highly problematic for many critics specially regarding the sources. In response to this warranted criticism, Conrad includes a subchapter on English as the lingua franca for academia in his book.
Nevertheless, Conrad makes a strong and convincing case for global history and the book remains highly relevant. Stressing the global as a perspective, which draws from a broad range of previous scholarship– comparative history, transnational history, postcolonial studies, multiple modernities and world-systems theory– global history has the potential to be applied in the composition of a cogent narrative. His ability to distinguish between globalisation, macro history and global history by drawing a distinct line in the spectrum of different approaches is one of the book’s most endearing features.
Though Prof. Conrad’s writings on the connection between ontological spaces, the reasons behind the transnational journey of a particular object of knowledge and how certain regional citizens (and non-citizens) encounter and engage with it have greatly inspired me, I am sceptical of the way Europe is privileged as a place where global models first came into existence.
For example, Conrad writes that “In non-Muslim South Asia, where a separate historiographical genre did not come into being until the colonial period, world-historical models were almost non-existent; and the same was true in Africa” (Conrad 20). Here Conrad demonstrates, perhaps, a blind spot. Two major works on this topic, Past Before Us (2013), by Romila Thapar, and Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (2001) by Velcheru N. Rao et al., were published long-before Conrad's 2016 book.
A common question confronted by students in India in most undergraduate programs is the extent to which early Indians or those who lived till medieval period of India, lack a sense of history. This is also the matter that Romila Thapar attempted to address in depth in Past Before Us. Thapar concludes historical tradition or the way history has been recorded, interpreted and passed through generations during an earlier period epoch “includes…a consciousness of past events relevant to or thought of as significant by a particular society…and…the recording of these events in a form which meets the requirements of that society” (Thapar 2014, 4). Thus, it entails examining the past from the perspective of the present and more importantly, reconstructing the past to justify the present.
The book is packed with references to the legitimising power of historical tradition, which serves as the framework for most of Thapar's work on early Indian historiography. The views she puts forward resonate with postcolonial critiques of imperial agendas and relate to a certain postmodern worldview, where both of these perspectives acknowledge the existence of multitudes in both space and time, as well as the fact that several voices have spoken about, remembered and claimed the past. Her perspective challenges the meta-narratives, absolutes, universals and the singularity of history in different ways.
Simultaneously, there is a crucial distinction between these perspectives as well. In her argument, she addresses and defends the historical sensibilities of early Indian history (Chaudhuri 2022). Her writing is not an attempt to “expand the current definition of history to accommodate forms of writing prevalent in early India,” either (Thapar, 2014, 681).
Instead, her approach reflects the importance of diving into the nuances of empirical understanding and studying the emergence, transformation, various forms of shaping a society, analysing the passive-inter-active agents of the historical traditions and its role in a particular paradigm.
Following Thapar, I question whether we can still embrace global history within the nation-state paradigm, particularly in cases such as in India where for example global capitalism emerged as a result of imperialism and oppression and its history is different significantly from that of the history of capitalism in Germany or England. These important differences within studying the history would allow for a more nuanced investigation of how national shifts are interconnected with global dynamics and might shed light on the rich tapestry of our shared human experience and the interdependence. It also begs the important question about the precise geography of capitalism.
Returning to the critique that global historians do not engage enough with non-anglophone historiography, only someone deeply familiar with Indian sub-continental history – would know Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay or Rabindranath Tagore’s historical narratives about the transformation of the historical tradition in the sub-continent. In 1853, Chattopadhyay penned one of his mouse famouse essays. The text, which is titled “Bharat Kalanka,” (In Bengali, The Shame of India), concludes “Indians, never felt the need to unite or adopt the nationalism ideology like the Westerners did, before the British colonialism. The Indians were forced to forge their unity among themselves (which they never felt to forge it before) as a result of torture and socio-economic-psychological forms of imperial humiliation" (Chattopadhyay, 2007 (1853), 234-304).
Doing global history requires sustained attention to these deep fissures of national historiography, but until the period of colonial modernity, the global South was though by many not to have been globally significant enough to warrant such careful analysis. In the words of Sebastian Conrad, we have to acknowledge, even in the twenty-first century, the “industrialised and economically privileged” parts of the world continue to dominate global history. Though mostly in the United States and other Western countries and in East Asia (Conrad, 2017, 215).
To conclude, as a student of the BCDSS, I would say that the biggest takeaway from this workshop is a need for a more and inclusive engagement with a historical topic and its sources, but also who’s global history?
Or, more precisely, who can claim global history? Do these questions also apply to a global history of slavery? To answer this question, I believe we have to wait for the scholars from Global South and, especially, the south and south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America to come up with their global histories. Prof. Conrad is optimistic about this prospect. Indeed, he emphasized its importance several times during the workshop. For him, encouraging scholars from the global south and east contribute to these ongoing conversations is an example of opening the door for scholars from global south with ‘their’ global history.