Well over one thousand pages in length, this book consists of a short introduction by the editor and five chapters with endnotes and select bibliographies. ‘Chapter’ is a misleading term as each is a self-contained book ranging from about 150 to about 250 pages. Two chapters have a primarily political focus: Charles Maier's ‘Leviathan 2.0: inventing modern statehood’ and Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton's ‘Empires and the reach of the global’. Dirk Hoerder considers global patterns of migration in ‘Migrations and belongings’; Steven Topik and Allen Wells offer economic history in ‘Commodity chains in a global economy’; and Emily Rosenberg provides a primarily cultural history of a wide range of transnational networks in ‘Transnational currents in a shrinking world’. All of the contributors are concerned with global history from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Every chapter covers many large topics, with abundant evidence backed up by useful, up-to-date referencing of the secondary literature. There are, perhaps inevitably, overlaps: for example, World's Fairs and exhibitions are considered in at least three of the chapters and it is regrettable that there is virtually no cross-referencing. To convey the variety of approaches and range of subjects, analyse the key arguments of each chapter, and evaluate the book as a whole is beyond the compass even of a featured review. Instead I will outline, compare, and evaluate the different strategies for writing global history adopted by the contributors.

In her short introduction Emily Rosenberg identifies the central challenge of constructing a framework which enables one to write global history as opposed to telling us a great many things about the history of the world between 1870 and 1945. First, there is what Rosenberg critiques here and in her own chapter as the ‘conventional’ or ‘Eurocentric’ approach with its ‘linear teleology’ (p. 961). Others have used the phrase ‘the West versus the rest’ to make the same point. I prefer ‘the imperial view’, as the major powers seen as dominating global history in this period – in whatever combination of coercive, economic, and cultural power – are neither exclusively European nor ‘Western’, if by that we mean the European powers and those non-European states dominated by white settlers. Maier in turn distinguishes two versions of this imperial view. One focuses on the conflicts between the imperial powers, treating the ‘rest’ as passive objects in this history. The other, more recent trend in historical writing Maier calls ‘the global binary’ (p. 186) in which, without abandoning the focus on the imperial powers, it is their collective conflict with and impact on the rest which becomes central.

While it is difficult to deny the centrality of actions and ideas emanating from the world's imperial powers and the dominant, usually capitalist economies, historians have increasingly sought to recognize the active role played in global history by regions and groups variously labelled as the ‘margins’, the ‘peripheries’, the ‘colonized’, or the ‘subalterns’ (the term coined by a group of Indian historians who pioneered ‘subaltern studies’). This concern is not just a matter of rescuing the great majority of humankind ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (E. P. Thompson's resonant phrase from The making of the English working class) but of showing that domination and exploitation are not one-way relationships; instead they comprise interactions which change all the parties involved. The collaborations and resistances, oppositions and critiques from the ‘subalterns’ demand responses from the power centres, and in the dynamic which this sets in train the whole set of relationships changes in ways intended by none of the participants. In this way, historians aim for a global history in which the world really is interconnected.

However, is it easier to state these views abstractly than to realize them successfully in detailed historical work. The chapters in this volume demonstrate different ways of going about this. The differences relate in part to the perspectives of the contributors, such as whether they adopt a postcolonial approach. Also important is the subject matter. Analysing the ‘invention of the modern state’ tends to take a historian in a different direction from one focusing on mass migrations, global commodity chains, global networks, or the impact and experience of imperial rule. I will briefly outline how each chapter combines varying approaches and subjects. Then I will compare and evaluate these various strategies for writing global history.

The chapter by Maier is closely connected to his ambitious project on the theme of modern statehood and territoriality.Footnote ¹ It is impossible to do justice to the range and power of his complex argument but a passage towards the end of this chapter summarizes it well: ‘Railroads were the complement of frontiers: defending frontiers was the precondition of state sovereignty since the seventeenth century – the frontier had been the prerequisite for Leviathan 1.0. The railroad promised to make the interior space of the national state a unit, economically and socially as well as politically. It was, in effect, the principal symbol of Leviathan 2.0’ (p. 214).

Maier sees the ‘wars of unification’ in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as crucial to this transformation of the modern state. German and Italian unification are but the most obvious examples; Maier includes the Meiji Restoration and the Union victory in the US Civil War, as well as the outcome of conflicts in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. To this one can add the responses of the major ‘old’ powers of Britain and France. It was, after all, the French Third Republic which, in Eugen Weber's phrase, made ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. The idea and practice of the state as a unified, integrated, and sharply delimited territorial community which brings together, in Maier's terms, ‘identity space’ and ‘decision space’ – a ‘nation-state’ – brought with it profound changes in state practice. Maier writes of a shift from ‘sovereignty’, the central concern of Machiavelli and Leviathan 1.0, to ‘governmentality’, that of Foucault and Leviathan 2.0. Michael Mann in his four-volume Sources of social power makes a similar distinction between ‘despotic’ power, which a regime exercises over a largely self-sustaining society, and ‘infra-structural’ power, under which mass citizenship, competing political parties, state interventions in education, welfare, economic protection, and major investment programmes transform the visible distinction between rulers and subjects into the conceptual distinction between state and society.

However, such transformations are largely confined to the metropolitan core of these states. The powerful nation-state is also an imperial state and the modes of rule change fundamentally beyond the national centre. Maier notes a shift from the early modern pattern of powerful, high-population, and rival states on the Atlantic seaboard conquering low-population zones, as in the Americas, to the penetration of modern state power into the high-population zones of Asia in the nineteenth century. (The old pattern does not disappear as there is also the formal colonization of much of Africa in this period.) Leviathan 2.0 might seek to project its notions of sharply defined territoriality and populations consisting of distinct cultural communities into this wider world but the reality is very different. The lines drawn on maps of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884 do, eventually, have a meaning, but it is one imposed in the long term by external power and not developed by some internal process of unification within the colonial territory.Footnote ²

Governmentality even in Europe and the USA appears to have been possibility rather than practice in pre-1914 Europe. Furthermore, the massive expansion of state power after the First World War takes us away from global capitalism and liberal or liberalizing states towards protectionism, autarky, and even command economies and authoritarian, fascist, and communist states.Footnote ³ Maier has less to say about these developments, other than to contrast them with what went before, perhaps because these states depart from the modernity which Maier especially associates with the patterns of sharp territoriality and governmentality in their pursuit of race empire, international communism, or a ‘co-prosperity’ sphere and in the clear return of despotic sovereignty, even if it is now claimed that the despot is but the embodiment of the subject (the Volk or the proletariat). It is only with the defeats and failures of these states that we can return, albeit it in new ways, to liberal and social democracy, free-market capitalism rather than command or autarkic economies, governmentality rather than sovereignty. However, Maier ends his chapter reflecting on whether neoliberalism, the fragmentation of sovereignty with the emergence of important sub- and supra-state political institutions, and the global flows of capital, goods, labour, and information escaping state control mean that Leviathan 2.0 is giving way to an as yet dimly understood Leviathan 3.0.

Maier's strategy for writing a global history is to construct a conceptual framework around key political concepts such as modernity, territoriality, sovereignty, and governmentality. This framework organizes the empirical detail, often presented in the form of a thick narrative, on the modern ‘invention’ of statehood. Maier also recognizes that this invention might set the framework for a global history but that such statehood is by no means all-conquering and offers but one way of writing global history. However, without some such conceptual framework of the kind which Maier deploys, it is arguable that little beyond arbitrary narrative can be achieved.

The contrast with Ballantye and Burton is marked. From the outset they make it clear that they do not intend to privilege the imperial centre, whether as modernizing state or anything else, in their treatment of empires and the reach of the global: ‘Following the work of postcolonial critics, we adhere to the global not as an a priori category but as a positioning device: an interpretative framework that enables us to position empire in relationship to an emergent and even halting or unfinished global set of processes rather than a territorially given set of coordinates’ (p. 301).

I find statements of this kind problematic. If the ‘global’ is to provide some basis for an interpretative framework, surely it is as a concept deployed prior to and in order to grasp empirical processes. Historians like Maier who use such concepts are aware that they do not mirror the world, but that is because knowledge never mirrors what it is knowledge about. The problem comes when one gestures towards a necessary conceptual framework and at the same time discards it as ‘an a priori category’. The danger is that we are left with the ‘mirror’ idea, as is made clear in a later quote: ‘One risk of arguing for empire as a kind of GPS (Global Positioning System) – even tongue in cheek – is that we imagine that ours is the view from the historiographical equivalent of Google Sphere’ (p. 305). Just what would one see from such a satellite? Quite probably many different and marvellous things, and this wide-ranging and knowledgeable chapter certainly provides that, but seen as coming one after the other in a sequence determined by the path of the satellite rather than the relationships one might seek to establish between those things. The chapter is, of course, much more structured than that as it moves from the orders which power attempts to impose (plantations, garrisons, mines, etc.) to how such order was experienced by the colonial subject. Nevertheless, this shift from exercising to experiencing power is more a story of juxtapositions rather than of either the halting advance of modernity or the interactions between agents who, though unequal, all have some measure of power and thereby shape the course of the relationships.

One could argue that such juxtaposition is an appropriate way to understand the fragmented nature of global history. Maier in his chapter becomes much more tentative dealing with the colonized peripheries than with the imperial cores. One great challenge for those writing ‘subaltern’ history is that the exercise of power almost necessarily fragments the capacities of those subject to it to respond with equivalent but alternative collective actions and understandings. The consequent challenge of constructing what he called ‘counter-hegemony’ preoccupied Gramsci. This effect of power has its more mundane expression in the fragmented and sparse nature of primary sources for historians researching subaltern experiences, ideas, and actions. Perhaps an argument which proceeds from the initiatives of the modernizing power-holders to the responses of those at the margins bind these together too tightly. However, loosening the ties too much can lead to a juxtaposition of separate stories: the view from the satellite. Ironically, in certain respects one could argue that such accounts confirm that those with power set the parameters which shape the fragmented responses of subalterns. One could also trace the development of effective challenges in such forms as socialist parties, extended religious communities, and nationalist opposition, or the construction of forms of collaboration which make subalterns a routine but significant component of the exercise of imperial power, such as trade unions and social reform parties. However, these are not central themes in this book, though Rosenberg touches on them in her chapter.

The history of mass migration and demography offers rich possibilities to the historian concerned to get away from ‘the view from above’. Steve Hochstadt claimed that such history was the most democratic available because, in the sparse data embodied in registers of births, marriages, and deaths and in the records of government departments charged with keeping tabs on immigrants and emigrants, we have the raw material for writing a history of key decisions made by millions of people who have left very little else in the way of more elaborate and reflective documentary sources for the historian.Footnote ⁴

Hoerder recognizes that power imbalance plays a key role in understanding the patterns of mass migration. One of his key concepts is that of ‘labour regimes’. Most mass migration is about moving from one kind of work (or lack of work) to another. As he points out, between the pure concepts of ‘slave’ and ‘free’ labour are ranged many different kinds of labour. The period from 1870 came after the end of the Atlantic slave trade and we often think of the mass migration of free white labour from Europe to the Americas as what principally succeeded that. Hoerder, with his global range and the use of the concepts of macro- and meso-zones of migration, corrects such an impression. Forms of bound labour short of slavery are vital, as well as the harsh compulsions of ‘free’ labour markets. There are mass migrations, varying over time, within Asia, between Asia and Africa, between Asia and the Americas, from western and central Russia into Siberia, from coastal China into inland China, within India, and many more. War and conquest play key roles, for example in the dramatic rise of population in Manchuria (renamed ‘Manchukuo’ in 1932) under Japanese rule, from fifteen million in 1911 to thirty million by 1931, these migrants mainly coming from China, principally Shandong province (p. 533).

Hoerder also shows that these migration flows are not bilateral or one-way. Many workers (as well as their remittances) go back ‘home’. Many migrants or their children typically move from one region to another, not just from one place to another within a region. The movements vary enormously by age, gender, and type. Women tend to figure more prominently in migrations assumed to be for the long term. Migration can be by individuals or groups (families, villages, extended kinship groups, etc.). Recent migration history has moved beyond ‘pull–push’ factors, although the impact of wars, enforced transfers, and the Great Depression makes clear that these continue to matter. Hoerder considers the role of networks of information and personal connection, both in the community of origin and in that of destination, but also involving intermediaries such as emigration agents. These networks often provide better explanations for patterns of migration than do economic cycles or state policies.

Having outlined the macro- and meso-levels of movement, Hoerder then goes on to consider the micro-story of the ‘journey’, shifting from the patterns established through plotting mass departures and arrivals to the experiences of individuals and groups moving. This chapter represents another kind of global history. It is not a conceptual argument such as Maier's about the global impact of imperial power, nor of global juxtapositions between imperial power and subaltern reaction as presented by Ballantyne and Burton. Rather the core concept itself – that of long-distance mass migration – has a global reach. Nevertheless, that global reach remains partial. Hoerder focuses on mass movement as migration and, again like Maier, tends to derive his basic framework from the relationships of global capitalism and imperial rivalry established before 1914. This does not so easily comprehend warfare and revolution, with its mass population displacement (for example, east-central Europe from 1914 to 1921, China between 1937 and 1949), or the coerced movement of millions of people, such as the Fremdarbeiter in the Third Reich or prisoners in Stalin's ‘Gulag Archipelago’, or the internationally approved population transfers between Greece and Turkey. This is not a criticism; no concept could comprehend all these mass movements without becoming too diffuse to be meaningful. The focus on mass migration as largely voluntary, if constrained, enables Hoerder to make sense of a huge amount.

The concept of a commodity chain does similar work. Topik and Wells's chapter falls into three parts. The first defines and clarifies the concepts of commodity and chain and their anchoring in the formation of global markets in which profit-seeking (including wages) by millions of workers, farmers, manufacturers, financiers, and others is the driving force. The second part outlines the transformations which enable global commodity chains, such as those in transportation and communication, the ‘second industrial revolution’ in which oil and electricity displaced steam power, the proliferation of new products (such as cars and aircraft, with spin-offs such as petroleum, rubber, and metals, chemicals, and mass consumer goods), and organizational innovations such as the giant corporation and mass advertising. All this is the necessary preamble to the third part, dealing with specific commodity chains. This concept enables the authors to integrate many elements into a coherent global history. Take the most elaborate case, that of grains (pp. 688–729), which traces the growth of a global market, measured in terms of price convergence from different zones of supply, to the rise of key world production zones. Innovations in technologies, from seeds to storage to transport to standardized product measurements (essential for constructing sophisticated exchanges dealing in futures), and in reaching the consumer, accompanied by increasingly elaborate advertising and marketing methods, are all combined in order to understand the formation of a commodity chain and its constant changes, as well as interactions with other commodities.

This is also a history of connection between strangers. With a change such as a new market or production method in one place comes change in another place. In a section on the production of henequen (binder twine), itself a product for which demand quickly increased with mass transportation of bagged grain and then rapidly declined as the combine harvester rendered the product redundant, the authors vividly convey the human consequences: ‘a grim irony emerged from the henequen commodity chain: capitalistic North American wheat farmers, embedded in a democratic political system, using advanced technology on their family wheat farms, created demand for henequen in Mexico that spread and intensified coerced gruelling manual labour and disrupted families in an oligarchic polity’ (pp. 749–50).

The great strength of this chapter is intrinsically linked to its major weakness: it is a study of a central feature of global capitalism. The authors recognize that there are dimensions of global history in which this is less central. There are many societies in which much production does not enter any extensive economic circuit, though often, in ‘dual economies’, these are linked to forms of capitalist development. Here, once again, we are likely to confront fragmentation and a paucity of historical sources. Then there are the encroachments of modern state power upon the market. It is difficult to study commodity chains for the short-lived race empires of the Third Reich and imperial Japan or of the Soviet Union, where coercion rather than market demand shaped extended economic circuits. Indeed, it is difficult to make the commodity chain central to the understanding of the economies of liberal states such as Britain and France in the First World War and Britain and the USA in the Second World War, although state-induced shifts in demand and supply are often channelled through market mechanisms. Again, this is not a criticism; every conceptual framework has its limits, and the framework used in this chapter makes vivid and visible the dynamic, ever-changing nature of global capitalism.

Rosenberg's chapter offers yet another perspective and approach with its focus on international networks of different kinds. She begins by insisting that these networks be understood as genuinely global rather than a product of imperial initiative and power. She points out that maps of the spread of diseases may well not exhibit the same patterns as maps of imperial expansion. Nevertheless, the central tension which Rosenberg identified in her introduction remains, as she acknowledges, that the conditions under which most networks were formed were crucially conditioned by the imbalances between the imperial powers and others. The elaborate analogy drawn with electric currents (they form circuits, are reversible, vary in strength, can be interrupted) is suggestive. (Interestingly it echoes a point made by Maier citing the work of James Clerk Maxwell on electromagnetic physics: ‘Every point in physical space was a point in an energy field and could be assigned a proportional quantity of energy potential. So too in the emerging statistical counting every point had a quantity of human energy resources linked to it’ (p. 167).) However, leaving aside the point that analogies are just that – suggestive points about affinities – it is also the case that in electricity production, distribution, and use, as in many international networks, there are clear imbalances of power.

Rosenberg looks at five kinds of network: internationalism, social networks, ‘nodes of exhibition and collection, epistemic affiliations based on expertise, and the spectacular flows of mass media and consumerism’ (p. 812). The sections which follow are rich in detail and wide-ranging in scope and cannot be conveyed here. I will instead focus on how far these networks are expressions of and responses to imperial power, or juxtapose imperial power and colonial response, or exhibit global relationships like those of commodity chains, or represent what one might call ‘counter-hegemonic’ moments which anticipate and even help bring about transformations in existing global imbalances of power.

The section on internationalism begins with Norman Angell's book The great illusion (1910), which argued that the interconnected nature of the contemporary world had rendered wars between the major powers counterproductive and irrational and, therefore, obsolete. It was easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to mock this argument. However, this argument did build from the very real interconnections which we identify as ‘globalization’, the conditions for which Rosenberg summarizes by sketching the emergence of new technologies such as the telegraph and the postal service and the inter-state agreements on how to run these. Such technologies and agreements provided models for internationalist networks other than those created through state agreements. Before 1914 we find this expressed in sport (the Olympic Games), efforts at codifying international law and setting up international courts of justice, and the Hague peace and disarmament conferences of 1899 and 1907. After 1918 such internationalism re-emerged, above all with the establishment and work of the League of Nations.

Just as it is easy to mock Angell, so one can point to the failure of the League of Nations to stop new imperial ventures (Italy in Ethiopia, Japan in Manchuria) which culminated in the outbreak of a new world war. Yet these were impressive and interesting achievements in their own time. Generally, however, I think that they confirm rather than challenge the ‘imperial’ view. The limited initiatives before 1914, such as the Hague conferences, frequently came from imperial powers. The League of Nations was the work of the Allied victors of 1918 (especially the USA), as was the Mandates system. What might have been explored further is what Rosenberg in a later section calls ‘co-production’, that is the involvement of non-imperial regions and groups in these networks and initiatives. Frank Dikotter, for example, in a book on republican China, has outlined the participation of Chinese jurists in international law networks, including the implementation of penal reform.Footnote ⁵

The section on ‘social networks’ is more heterogeneous. I think that the term is misleading because the actors in the networks which Rosenberg considers are agents of movements such as those promoting Esperanto and Braille rather than, as today, principally individuals in friendship networks. Some of these networks are very ‘Western’, such as those advocating feminism or birth control. Some are apparently ‘indigenous’, such as the Harrist churches (named after their leader, William Wadé Harris, pictured on p. 872) and the Faith Tabernacle movement in West Africa, though these profess Christian beliefs associated with the spread of imperial power. Others extend the claims of Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, often in combinations which defy the juxtaposition of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western. Indeed, ‘world religions’ are arguably modern constructs used at the same time to critique and reject secular modernity.Footnote ⁶ Some are explicitly ‘counter-hegemonic’, such as the socialist organizations established by the Second International before 1914 and the Third International after 1917. However, most of these networks are of intellectuals and/or enthusiasts, not established to oppose imperial power so much as to advocate particular, often ‘Western’, values.

The further sections on World's Fairs and exhibitions, on circuits of expertise, and on spectacles such as circuses and cinema again seem to me largely to confirm the dominance of imperial power. For example, almost all the world's fairs are held in the cities of such powers, and even the apparent exceptions such as Istanbul (1863) and Cairo (1869) look different on closer inspection: one staged by an imperial power seeking to modernize; the other linked to the opening of the Suez Canal. Even when there is an anti-Western critique it is generally initiated by figures from metropolitan centres, such as William Du Bois, who sought to present the Afro-American community as thoroughly Western in Paris in 1900. Rosenberg makes a very interesting point about ‘co-production’, citing for example the role of local experts who helped in the work of mapping India and, in doing so, gave us the word ‘pundits’. Yet cartographical projects such as these are part of a ‘Western’ enterprise which one can link to Maier's arguments about territoriality.Footnote ⁷ Such ‘co-production’ fits well with that broader analysis of imperial power which sees it as dependent upon indigenous collaboration and which goes on to argue that it provides the basis for the subsequent development of effective modern opposition to imperial power, above all in nationalist forms such as that of the Indian National Congress.Footnote ⁸

Rosbenberg provides a very interesting and subtle discussion of ‘race science’ discourses and the networks to which these gave rise: ‘For brevity … one might tease out four dominant threads: a missionary discourse, a physical anthropology discourse, a discourse of culture, and a discourse of exalting race mixture and local empowerment (given various labels, such as indigenismo)’ (p. 939). This can lead on to a consideration of forms of pan-nationalism which flourished from the late nineteenth century until well into the interwar period. Here one sees an interesting ideological combination which accepts ‘Western’ race science but rejects Western race hierarchy. This ‘equal but different’ view gave rise to visions of alternatives to the current global order and fed into the territorial nationalist movements of the post-1945 period which, although frequently regarded as political failures, did eventually replace extended empires with a series of sovereign nation-states.Footnote ⁹

These five chapters demonstrate different strategies for writing global history for a pivotal period in the modern formation of global political, economic, and cultural connections. What they all share is the recognition of the centrality of the global conflicts between the major imperial powers following the breakdown of a weak British global hegemony and before the assertion of bipolar power during the Cold War period, followed by the current era of (weak?) US global hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They all point to the technology transformations which conditioned this conflict and there is much overlap between the chapters on these matters. They all turn away from an older historiography which focused on the conflicts between the imperial powers (whether declining, dominant, or challenging) and are much more concerned with the ‘global binary’, the nature and impact of the combined forms of imperial power upon the whole world. They all recognize that this is not a simple imposition or transfer of modern power, whether it takes the form of domination and exploitation or assimilation and emulation.

For the most part the chapters also recognize a shift in these global patterns before 1914 and after 1918, above all in the emergence of forms of power and exploitation which interrupt or even reverse the narrative of progress (as much that of Marx as that of Mill) associated with liberalism, democracy, capitalism, and whatever future might be thought to be germinating in that narrative. However, the templates used are largely derived from the earlier period, above all of modernizing imperial states, global capitalism, and the increasing formalization of colonial rule. The treatment of communist and fascist states, command economies, and powerful projects to transcend the model of the pluralist world of national-imperial states which appeared so central to the post-1918 period are less effectively integrated into the various strategies deployed by the contributors.

Broadly I would identify three strategies. First, there is the construction of a conceptual framework based on some central notion of modernity and the complex ways in which this is advanced globally over this period. That is the line which Maier takes. Then there is the juxtaposition of imperial power and the responses of the colonized, recognizing the jagged and fragmented character of this global history, which is most evident in Ballantyne and Burton and is one feature of the chapter by Rosenberg. Finally there is a focus on a specific global, or at least transcontinental, set of relationships such as mass migration or the global commodity chain. In part this is also displayed in Rosenberg's analysis of transnational, even global, networks. Each approach has characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

One can think of other subjects which might have figured in such a book, such as what one might call a global military history which could have the additional advantage of making war and the violent transformation of power relationships more central. One can also think of other perspectives, such as the transformations in ways of opposing imperial power, which would take us from the rather separate intellectual critiques or collective resistance movements of the pre-1914 period to the organized ideological-political movements that become more important after 1918. Another possibility is to find frameworks distinct from those of global imperialism and capitalism. Christopher Bayly has very productively used concepts such as ‘archaic globalisation’, and recently it has been suggested that the notion of ‘early modernity’ can be deployed beyond its location in ‘early modern’ European history. Jürgen Osterhammel, one of the editors of the series in which this book is published, has tried out a more flexible approach in his global history of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰

All this indicates just how vast and complex is the enterprise of global history. This book – or rather these five books – take us on different routes through this history. They show us that each route, to be taken successfully, requires distinct concepts and perspectives and must be combined with extensive knowledge of a range of topics which span the world and some seventy-five years of massive transformation. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of global history.