For many decades, the history of modern Europe was told in textbook surveys as a self-contained subject, particularly when it was dominated by political, diplomatic, and military historians. Through most of the twentieth century, issues of war and peace understandably dominated the subject, along with the rise of modern nation-states and the course of diplomatic relations between them. Economic and social history was treated as something outside this political mainstream, but it too was largely contained within the bounds of the European nation-state. The wider world generally appeared, if at all, only in separate chapters devoted to “Empire,” and here too historians treated the topic as an extension of European history, echoing Otto von Bismarck’s famous statement on colonial issues: “My map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa.”Footnote ¹ The great international conferences (notably Berlin in 1884) were analyzed purely in terms of relations between European powers.Footnote ²

As Richard Drayton rightly remarks in his contribution to this symposium, what is new about the global turn is its insistence that “European and extra-European were in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence” through much of history—a point also made by David Motadel, among others.Footnote ³ European interactions with the rest of the world were a two-way process. To take just a few examples, the end of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in South and Central America in the 1820s had a huge influence on political processes within Europe, leading to upheavals in Spain and Portugal and infusing liberal and revolutionary movements in Europe more generally with new energy and determination.Footnote ⁴ The Legitimist French monarchy might not have been overthrown in 1830 but for events in Algeria.Footnote ⁵ The unification of Italy owed an enormous amount to the military and political experience acquired by the radical nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi during his time fighting in South America.

In addition, migration has played a huge role in blurring the boundaries between Europe and the rest of the globe. The emigration of some sixty million Europeans to other parts of the world in the nineteenth century was a process of enormous importance: in the case of Italy, around 40 percent of those who emigrated between 1897 and 1906 returned, a figure that rises to 66 percent in 1913.Footnote ⁶ But of course many of them returned several times, so that there was very much a two-way traffic between Europe and the Americas or other destinations of European emigrants. Many sent back money to their families at home, and their financial contribution was vital to impoverished families in areas like Sicily or Calabria. Ideas, experiences, and social mores were not merely exported from Europe to Australasia or the Americas, they were also reimported in an altered form that would in turn shape society and culture in Europe itself. Already by the late nineteenth century, American industry was exerting an enormous influence on European society, as American consumer goods and products began to transform everyday life. By the end of the 1920s an economic crash on Wall Street could plunge Europe into a depression so deep that it had a transformative effect on political life, most notably in Germany, where Hitler would not have come to power without it.

In the nineteenth century, the rhetoric of anti-slavery campaigns in the Americas was adapted to play a central role in the propaganda of emancipatory movements in Europe, such as the labor and feminist movements. The supposed contrast to which Sven Beckert alludes in his essay above, between free wage-labor in Europe and forms of unfree labor in other parts of the world, was far more blurred than has sometimes been assumed.Footnote ⁷ Serfdom endured in large parts of Europe until the 1860s, and in a few places later even than that, while sharecropping rendered labor effectively unfree across southern Europe into the twentieth century. Many poor people who left for the Americas to work as indentured laborers came from such backgrounds and would not have noticed much difference in their new situation. Still, even sharecroppers had some rights, unlike plantation slaves: the reduction of human beings to chattels in slave-owning societies provided powerful linguistic ammunition to feminists in Europe, who identified strongly with enslaved people across the Atlantic and their lack of legal autonomy.Footnote ⁸

The nineteenth century in Europe was a period of relative peace, certainly compared to the eras that preceded and followed it. This was partly due to the fact that the European states, terrified by the breakdown of the international order between 1789 and 1815, were determined to resolve their differences through negotiation in the congresses and conferences of the “Concert of Europe,” a loose system of cooperation that failed only in the 1850s and 1860s as Bismarck, Cavour, and Napoleon III embarked on a series of wars that resulted in the unification of Germany and Italy. Even these were limited in their aims, their duration, and their extent, however. In the eighteenth and again the twentieth century, European conflicts played out on the global stage, but in the nineteenth century the British command of the oceans, following the defeat of the French in Canada and India, ensured that conflicts outside Europe did not lead to wars within it. Where rivalries, particularly in Africa, threatened to disrupt the European consensus, they were quickly settled by international agreement.

The Concert of Europe finally broke down at the beginning of the twentieth century, for reasons that cannot be understood unless that breakdown is placed in the broader context of the age of European imperialism, with satiated colonial powers turning against each other and ideologies spawned by the imperial experience, notably racism and Social Darwinism, fueling antagonisms within Europe itself. The First World War, after all, unlike all other armed conflicts based in Europe since 1815, was a war not between nation-states so much as between empires, extending across the globe. On the western front at least it turned into a war of attrition largely because of two of the less admirable inventions to have come to Europe from America—barbed wire and the machine-gun. The peace settlement in 1918–1919 was shaped in a crucial way by the United States, whose subsequent withdrawal into isolationism did not alter the basic global dominance it was now positioned to exert, as the onset of the Depression in 1929 so clearly showed.

Europe and the rest of the world existed in a symbiotic relationship in myriad ways, and not only in the twentieth century; the continent’s boundaries, political, intellectual, cultural, social, economic, and intellectual, were porous and hard to define, but this makes writing European history more interesting than if we merely assumed its identity to be unproblematic or self-contained.Footnote ⁹ In her contribution to this forum, Abigail Green draws attention to the ways in which religious belief and institutions transcended the bounds of Europe. The continent’s religious minorities, and above all, Muslims and Jews, “belong to religious worlds that have historically transcended both Europe and its nation-states,” she argues, and of course this was particularly the case with the Ottoman Empire, which controlled most of the Balkans until immediately before the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote ¹⁰ In areas such as Bosnia, Ottoman rule had led to mass conversion to Islam, and, as Green rightly remarks, Albanian Muslims were central to the Ottoman administration—one example would be Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, “the Lion of Ioannina,” a retired Albanian brigand whose brutal and corrupt rule over a large part of northern Greece helped spark the movement for Greek independence in the 1820s.Footnote ¹¹

Stretching across the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Ottoman Empire blurred the boundaries between Europe and Asia, and the growth of movements for independence in its European territories, beginning with Greece and spreading across the region in the course of the nineteenth century, was in part a self-assertion of European identity, based on Christianity. In this sense at least, Green is right to suggest that Europe was synonymous with Christianity, but long before the nineteenth century this had ceased to be the case in a more general sense: the term “Europe” came into general use in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a secular replacement for “Christendom,” resulting from the division of Christianity first into Orthodox and Catholic, and then into Catholic and Protestant. Above all, perhaps, the spread of Christianity across the world by Jesuit and, later, other missionaries, rendered otiose the employment of “Europe” and “Christendom” as synonyms. Europeans had been able for centuries to ignore the Coptic Church in Africa, but they could not ignore the existence of growing numbers of Christians scattered across the globe who owed their allegiance to Churches based in Europe. In the nineteenth century, too, the Russian conquest of central Asia and Siberia, with its concomitant if only partially successful export of Orthodox Christianity, further undermined any equation of Europe with the Christian religion. In this sense, it is entirely correct to claim that “Europe” was essentially constituted by global conjunctures, though, one has to add, not exclusively so.Footnote ¹²

Yet such global conjunctures are often downplayed in histories of modern Europe. Eric Hobsbawm’s famous volumes The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire do a great deal to integrate European and global history, as the title of the third volume suggests.Footnote ¹³ Of course, these books were not conceived as histories of the world in their respective periods; rather, they were studies of the impact of the “dual revolution”—British industrialization and French political ideologies—on the rest of the world. For Hobsbawm that influence was not always one-way: note for example his thesis that British industrialization would not have occurred but for the creation of markets in India for cotton grown in America on the backs of slaves transported from Africa, one of many linkages encapsulated in the title of his economic history of modern Britain, Industry and Empire.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, however, there is no escaping these books’ essential Eurocentrism, as, seen in the round, they document and analyze Europe’s spreading influence on other parts of the globe. This is particularly obvious in the final volume in Hobsbawm’s great Age of … series, The Age of Extremes, whose designation of the years from the end of the Second World War to the economic downturn of the 1970s as a “golden age” ignored the disasters that befell China, Korea, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia during this period, as Perry Anderson pointed out in a perceptive review.Footnote ¹⁵ Other general surveys of modern European history, even the best and most comprehensive ones, seldom raise their gaze above Europe’s own horizons, unless it is in order to describe and analyze the age of imperialism and the “scramble for Africa.”Footnote ¹⁶

There is no doubting the fact that the “global turn” in historical scholarship has brought major benefits for the study of European history. A good example is the recent book by the Oxford historian Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁷ All surveys of European history after the end of the Second World War include a chapter or section on decolonization—for instance Ian Kershaw’s magisterial Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950–2017 or Martin Conway’s Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968.Footnote ¹⁸ Betts points out, however, that what immediately preceded decolonization was just as important: the reconstitution of European overseas empires after 1945 was, he argues persuasively, an integral part of the reconstruction of European civilization overall. Central to this effort was the claim that the colonial empires were justified because they extended the benefits of European civilization to parts of the world that were still uncivilized in many ways. Europe was shaped not merely by the shedding of most of its overseas colonies in the postwar era, but also by the massive and ultimately futile attempt to reconstitute them. It continues in many ways to be marked by this experience today, not least in the case of Great Britain, where a key element in the ideology behind Brexit has been nostalgia for Britain’s imperial past and a belief that it can somehow be resurrected by turning away from Europe towards a future defined by “global Britain” and the “Anglosphere.”Footnote ¹⁹

How far will the “global turn” go? Will it result in the permanent transformation of the field? Motadel describes the “global turn” as a long-term development; those who still “feel uneasy about attempts to open up the continent’s history” he portrays as old-fashioned, resisting the globalizing imperatives now sweeping across the profession, so that, because of this obduracy, global history appears to remain controversial.Footnote ²⁰ But the global history textbook he cites as having run into criticism in nationalist circles, the Histoire mondiale de la France, was published in 2017, no doubt after several years of preparation.Footnote ²¹ While it might well have been conceived on the crest of the globalizing wave, the finished volume arrived into a very different context. Rather than a lingering effect of the outdated genre of national histories, as Motadel suggests, Robert Tombs’s massive book The English and their History, published in 2014, is part of a new wave of national, indeed nationalist histories (it is not irrelevant to note here that Tombs has been one of the leading intellectual proponents of Brexit).Footnote ²²

The reaction against globalization, itself of course a global phenomenon, that followed the economic crash of 2008 has created a new political context for historical scholarship, prompting the hollowing-out of the political center in one country after another. It has stimulated the rise of a new nationalism, fueled by a resentful hostility to immigration, that in many cases spills over into xenophobia and racial hatred. The reaction to the Histoire mondiale de la France is not a hangover from a previous era in which national history held sway, but the product of this new culture in which populist parties such as the Rassemblement national or the Alternative für Deutschland articulate an aggressive form of nationalism built on a narrow and exclusively positive concept of national history.Footnote ²³

The political turn from globalism to nationalism is already having an effect on teaching, writing, and research in the historical profession. In the United Kingdom, successive governments have sought to encourage schools to teach a patriotic version of British, or in fact mainly English, history as a means of cementing national identity and transmitting it to immigrants and their children. It was under the Labour Party governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997–2010) that school history curricula and examinations were revised to include a greater proportion of English history. As Conservative secretary of state for Education from 2010 to 2014, Michael Gove tried to make schools to teach nothing but English history, and though he was eventually forced to withdraw his proposals by the combined efforts of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, and the Historical Association, political pressure on historians to focus more on English history, narrowly conceived, is not going to go away.Footnote ²⁴ A huge chasm has opened up between the political world and the academic world, between nationalist conceptions of history and globalized ones. This is almost inevitably resulting in funding cuts for history teaching and research at universities, and increased government interference in what is being taught in schools.

Historical scholarship, however, has its own, internally driven dynamic of evolution and change, responding not just to the general political and cultural environment in which it is written, but also to intellectual influences and developments that exert their own particular impact. At one time or another, we have been told that social history is the only way to understand the past, including past politics; that we have to embrace quantification, or psychoanalysis; that we must focus on language since everything is expressed through it and so determined by it; that culture, including political culture, is the key to grasping the real causes of events like the French Revolution; that counterfactual speculation provides the best means of explaining real events in the past; or even that we cannot really know anything about history because all texts, including historical documents, are given meaning solely by the reader, and never by the writer. Each time there is a new development, its advocates proclaim that it will utterly transform historical studies, and nothing will ever be the same again. Over time, such grandiose claims generally become more modest, and the new perspective becomes more of an addition to existing ones than a substitution for them.Footnote ²⁵ Whatever happens, however, it is certain that writing European history will no longer be possible without a global perspective, and that surely is to the good.