Global History Collaborative
Teachings
– Resource materials are available in the « Research and Study Materials » section
– For GHC Summer Seminar, please report to the « Summer Seminar » section
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Berlin: MA Global History
(Joint Degree Freie Universität Berlin & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
– MA Global History program flyer
– Webpage of the MA Global History
Today’s interconnected world is not a new phenomenon, but looks back on a long history of exchange and interaction. The history of migration and trade, of empires and nation-states, of religion and the environment, of ideas, of communication and war have all contributed to linking different parts of the world, albeit unevenly. The MA program Global History is dedicated to exploring the various trajectories of cross-border entanglements across the globe. Unlike programs that treat global history as an extension of imperial or economic history, our approach emphasizes the entanglements between specific regions and global structures. By focusing on comparisons, connections, and processes of global integration, the program helps students to understand the forces that have continuously shaped and restructured the world. Global history is one of the most innovative and productive fields of scholarly inquiry today, and challenges us to think about history and its methodologies in new ways. It acknowledges a broad variety of different perspectives and attempts to arrive at a non-Eurocentric reading of the global past.
Program
The MA Global History is a two-year graduate program. Students work with preeminent historians at the Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The program is based on close cooperation between the History and Area Studies departments including specialists of virtually all parts of the world, and enables students to specialize in the region of their interest. They will acquire an understanding of macro-processes and of change on a global scale. But more importantly, they are encouraged to acquire indepth knowledge about the history of a specific region that they will learn to situate in the context of global structures and transformations.
Courses
• Compulsory courses specifically addressing issues of global history, including courses on theory and methods, and offering global perspectives on subjects such as migration, colonialism, empire, religion, environment, state-building, war, social movements, dictatorship, nationalism, and the history of ideas.
• Courses that explicitly focus on the region the student has chosen, such as the history of North America, East Asia, South or South East Asia, Western or Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, or the history of the Islamic World. • Beyond their focus area, students are encouraged to take courses that broaden their knowledge of other regions or help them acquire additional language skills.
• The program’s last phase consists of a substantial and empirically grounded master’s thesis; the writing process is supported by the accompanying colloquium.
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Paris GHC Seminar
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Savoirs, institutions, économies. Histoires connectées et dynamiques globales. Knowledge, Institutions, Economies. Connected histories and global dynamics
3er vendredi du mois de 15 h à 18 h (salle 2, 105 Bd Raspail)
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Alessandro Stanziani avec:
- Pablo Blitstein, CRH, Claude Chevaleyre, ENS Lyon, Jawad Daheur, CERCEC, Cloé Drieu, CETOBaC, Marc Elie, CERCEC ; Corinne Lefevre, CEIAS ; Catarina Madeira Santos, IMAF, Natalia Muchnik CRH-GEI, Xavier Paulès, CCJ, Antonella Romano, CAK, Silvia Sebastiani, CRH , Emmanuel Szurek, CETOBaC, Ines Županov, CEIAS
- Ce séminaire vise à discuter – suivant une perspective interdisciplinaire – des trajectoires multiples des circulations des personnes, des idées et savoirs, des institutions et des valeurs au-delà des confins géographiques et politiques. À la différence des programmes déjà existant qui traitent l’histoire globale comme une extension de l’histoire impériale ou de l’économie historique, nous mettons en évidence les connections entre des régions spécifiques et des structures globales. En ayant recours aux comparaisons, connections et aux processus d’intégration globale, nous invitons chercheurs et étudiants à comprendre les forces qui ont contribué à structurer notre monde dans le passé et de nos jours.
The aim of this seminar is to explore, from multidisciplinary perspectives, the various trajectories of cross-border entanglements – of people, knowledge, ideas, institutions, goods, across the globe. Unlike programs that treat global history as an extension of imperial or economic history, our approach emphasizes the entanglements between specific regions and global structures. By focusing on comparisons, connections, and processes of global integration, the program helps students and scholars to understand the forces that have continuously shaped and restructured the world.
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- Histoire globale. Sources, méthodes, objets, by Alessandro Stanziani, Professor, EHESS
Mardi de 11 h à 13 h (room 2, 105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris)
Global History is not only the history of globalization. It mostly aims at showing on the longue durée the connections between different areas and regions. In this course, global Entanglements and local specificities, interactions and hierarchies will be expressed in critical historical approaches. Global history will be investigated on defined objects and multiple scales (of object themselves, of time and space).
The course is made of three main packages:
– methods and approaches. World history, comparative history, connected history, etc.
– sources of global history. Archives, their classifications and history in France, Russia, Mauritius Island, Kew; sources and data: methods and epistemological questions.
– global history, social sciences and sciences. Connections, interfaces.
Syllabus on line at https://ent.aria.ehess.fr (restricted to ehess services users), or downloadable here.
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Race in early modern European societies and colonial empires: processes, classification, and ideologies of segregation, Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Silvia Sebastiani, Pietro Corsi.
Mardi, 9h-13h (Room 3, 190 avenue de France, Paris 13)
This seminar focuses on “race” in Ancien Régime societies of Europe and its colonies. It examines the historical, social and cultural conditions that contributed to shape racial discourses and practices, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. All along this period (and beyond), “race” is a fluid and uncertain concept, which is shaped, challenged, appropriated, rebuilt and captured during its own circulations. It does not exist as an object in itself; but it is an imaginary category, operating on the basis of a symbolic model and regulated by power relationships.
Our working hypothesis is to consider the fourteenth/fifteenth-century Iberian societies as a laboratory of racial categories, and as a first case of “guerre des races” (“war of races”), in Michel Foucault’s terms. We suggest that racial discourses and practices are situated phenomena, which initially developed in relation to a part of the inner population. In so doing, we not only propose a spatial and chronological displacement of the question of race within Europe, but also a shift of emphasis from the colour issue to the question of genealogy. Far from denying the crucial role played by skin colour in feeding racism, we aim at outlining the plurality of matrices of racial notions and practices that, at different times, vary from invisible genealogies through visible treats and physicality.
Despite its restricted semantic definition all along the early modern period, the category of “race” emerges historically by stressing the continuity between the physical and cultural traits of peoples. In such discourses, the moral character and social behavior of individuals (not understood in their individual capacity, but as members of specific communities) are entwined with their own physiological nature, and transmitted from generation to generation throughout the fluids – blood, semen, milk – or the body tissues. Behaviors and beliefs are also considered as embedded in the body, even when individuals choose to adopt different social or moral customs. Individuals are thus deprived of the possibility of breaking away from the “race” to which they belong, while their “race” is denied to undergo transformation. Racial thinking immobilizes peoples in a time without history, whereas it imprisons individuals in their own “race”.
An important part of our seminar engages with the historiographical debate and the issue of the pertinent chronology of the emergence of race. In recent years, two extreme postures have been developed: the first identifies the origins of a racial discourse in the antiquity, either in the book of Genesis, or in Greek philosophy; the second, by contrast, limits the study of race to the emergence of the concept of inheritance at the end of the eighteenth century. In the first approach, the very longue durée of racism makes it difficult to grasp the singularity of the set of attitudes that Europeans expressed in their relationships with other peoples, either inside or outside Europe. In the second stance, the very short period prevents historians from identifying socio-cultural, political, or religious ruptures, occurring between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries; consequently, phenomena such as the Iberian purity of blood or the slave trade in the Atlantic world are rejected in a prehistory of racism. What we propose is to consider the processes of stigmatization and exclusion of Jews, at the end of the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and the segregation of Black people as part of the same history of racism. In so doing, by entangling the Jewish question and the Black question, we aim to outline a racial history of the moyenne durée within the Atlantic framework.
In the ancient régime period, racial thinking moves within a framework of tensions between the visibility and invisibility of differences, between the election of the aristocracy and the segregation of the populace. This semantic field is dynamic as well as fragile. It never becomes fully autonomous from the techniques of persecution, distinction, exclusion, and concurrence that organize social and political life. -
Actualité de la recherche sur l’Asie du Sud. Séminaire du CEIAS, by Marie Fourcade (Research Assistant, EHESS), Caterina Guenzi (Associate Professor, EHESS), Corinne Lefèvre (Research Fellow, CNRS), Ines Zupanov (Senior Research Fellow, CNRS).
Monthly research seminar: 2nd Monday of the month 1:30-4:30 PM (room 638, building Le France, 190-198 avenue de France 75013 Paris), from December 9th 2014 to June 9th 2015.
This seminar presents and discusses the current research conducted by the members of the CEIAS (both academics and students) from a wide range of disciplinary fields: anthropology, economics, geography, history, literature, philology, political sciences, sociology. The sessions are three hours long and include two presentations echoing one another through a dialogue between different disciplines, cultural areas or around recent publications. Conceived primarily as a forum of exchange and discussion, this course is open to master and PhD students. -
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Vers une histoire des jeux de hasard: le cas du fantan, by Xavier Paulès (EHESS)
Room 10, 105 bvd Raspail, from Nov. 7 2016
Gambling games do cross boundaries. The western impact in China during the Late Qing and Republican period, with the import of gambling games like horse and dog races, poker, baccarat, roulette, pelote basque, is relatively well documented. Yet no attention has been paid to the fact that during the same period, many Chinese games took the reverse direction and made their way to other countries. This is true of the game I shall deal with in this seminar: fantan番攤. Fantan was one of the most popular gambling games in Late Qing and Republican South China. During the second half of the nineteenth century, as a consequence of coolie emigrations, fantan became a common sight among overseas Cantonese communities During its apogee – the late nineteenth century -, fantan was played on every continent: it was played in South China (the Pearl River Delta was its hotbed), in every big city in the United States, in Australia, in London, in South Africa, in Peru as well as in Cuba. Yet the ‘globalization’ of fantan was selective. Only in some places did the game cross the boundaries of the Chinese diaspora to take deep roots in the local population, like in Vietnam and the Philippines where fantan was known of under a local name, respectively as baquan and capona. Moreover, in those two cases, some changes took place in the way fantan was played in order to better cater to the characteristics of the local demand.
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Princeton: Program & Teaching
1. Programming.
The Lab oversees several international partnerships. One is the collaboration between Princeton and Oxford, which has just received a significant grant from the Leverhulme Trust and is coordinated by Linda Colley. Another is a grant from the Mellon Foundation on Empires and Global Regimes, which will start next year and is coordinated by Michael Reynolds. A regular monthly « Global History Workshop » for graduate students and faculty is also held in Princeton.
2. Teaching.
Princeton has a global history gateway undergraduate course (« The World Since 1300 »), taught as a MOOC by J. Adelman on Coursera and lately on a start-up called NovoEd. They also have a two-course sequence at the graduate level. The first part, 1300-1850 is taught by J. Adelman; Steve Kotkin teaches the sequel, 1850-present. syllabuses can be consulte here:
Grad World History 2015 syllabus
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Tokyo: 2015 GHC Scholarship program at the University of Tokyo
– University of Tokyo scholarship program
GHC Scholarship annoucement This program aims to train junior researchers and build an international network of researchers who are interested in world/global history. To this end, universities and institutions taking part in the GHC will organize a summer school for graduate students once a year on a rotational basis. The program will send junior researchers, including postdoctoral fellows and graduate students writing doctoral theses, to the other participating universities and institutions so that they can discuss on the international stage interpretations, understandings, and descriptions of world history and Japanese history. We are accepting applications from junior researchers and graduate students who wish to participate in this GHC Scholarship Program during the 2015 academic year either at Princeton University in the United States, France’s Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, or either Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin or Freie Universitat Berlin in Germany. (deadline is January 31, 2015)