This chapter argues that recent global histories of Europe represent one specific mode of global awareness in a long history of European global historical and social scientific consciousness. European history after our most recent “global turn” must take into account previous modes of global consciousness and examine how globalization has been shaped by this knowledge. Past understanding of global interconnectedness did not necessarily lead to more open borders, increased interdependency, or growing cultural fluidity. Dis-integrating and downscaling modes of social organization were invented and reinvigorated in response to perceived global forces. There were also conscious attempts to channel the fruits and accumulations of global processes based on an awareness of their potentially enriching and destabilizing impact. These efforts to take control of globalization did not stop it, but they did give it a specific shape in particular moments. This chapter argues that the half-century following the French Revolution witnessed what might be called a deglobalizing globalization: a moment when the global integration that many considered responsible for the upheaval of the Revolution did not stop but was redirected in the service of a sovereign nation through the birth of new modes of social science and history writing.

Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe’s past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of “advanced” western European phenomena.

European history has been defined as a field by a notion of Europe – its borders, values, civilization, and nationalities – that is structured by Christianity and its secular legacies. Rather than seeking to globalize the history of Europe by considering the impact of European Christianity on other parts of the world, and how it was impacted by them, this chapter challenges that narrative. It asks how the historiography of Europe can be integrated with the historiographies of Europe’s historic non-Christian populations, namely Jews and Muslims. These are historiographies with their own rhythms, conceptual frameworks, and geographies in which Europe carries quite different connotations. They shift our attention from the north and west to the south and east, enjoining us to think differently about Europe and the diversity that has always existed within it. Separately, these historiographies speak to very different experiences. Taken together, they help us to think differently about the interface between Europe and the world and to write the history of Europe itself against the grain.

Benefitting from a wealth of pathbreaking scholarship that often focuses on macro-level histories, this chapter advocates zooming in on individual interpretations and experiences. By doing so, it argues, historians can open up nuanced perspectives that risk becoming submerged in studies where, rather paradoxically, actual migrants are displaced by an emphasis on overarching migration phenomena. Taking the late modern era as its focus, it traces the global dimensions of two lives spanning almost two centuries to open out broader questions, not least about race and ethnicity. Jacob Riis (1849–1914) and Gérald Bloncourt (1926–2018) were both leading documentary photographers who shared a deep commitment to social reform and the amelioration of working-class conditions. Each recorded migration histories on camera and in writing, thereby enabling an analysis of multimedia representations emanating from the same source. That both were of migration backgrounds themselves – Riis having moved from Denmark to the United States and Bloncourt from Haiti to France – renders the images and texts they created particularly resonant. Their own origins and mobile lives proved crucial to their interpretations of the wider flows of people that have connected Europe with different global settings – and continue to do so today.

This chapter explores the global entanglements of Europe’s musical past, showing that the continent’s music culture has never been isolated and has always been shaped by global influences.

This chapter reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the chapter explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: The question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in the relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.

This chapter offers a reflection on the historical study of modern Europe’s entanglements with the wider world. It explores the ways in which European history can be integrated into global history, considering Europe as not only an engine but also a product of global transformations. Providing a broad historiographical overview, it discusses the impact of the “global turn” on different fields of modern European history, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and environmental history. It argues that global history represents not only a challenge but also a huge opportunity for Europeanists to open up modern European history. This will ultimately help us reshape our understanding of the boundaries of Europe – and the field of European history itself. In other words, it will allow us to deprovincialize Europe. More generally, the chapter also engages with broader questions about continents (and other spatial units) as ontological categories in historical studies.

Since the 2010s, the writing of European history – in both its incarnations, as the history of Europe and as the histories of nations in Europe – has seen fundamental transformations. Though it has been adapted in different ways, the global turn has deeply affected the historiography produced in many European countries. On the one hand, crucial watersheds of European history have been reinterpreted as part of larger configurations and as responses to global challenges. On the other hand, it is now clear that Europe’s claim to unity and cohesion was reinforced, not least, by observers from without. In the late nineteenth century, in societies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, contemporaries began to refer to a “Europe” that was less a specific location than a product of the imagination; the result less of geography or culture than of global geopolitics. What emerges, then, is an understanding of the history of the continent that places it firmly in the context of global conjunctures and repeated moments of reterritorialization.

This chapter addresses the place of material culture in the global turn in European history. How did extra-European objects come to be part of, and sometimes even define, the materiality of Europe? Goods from outside Europe have gained attention as objects of historical research through several separate pathways: the focus on global goods in the field of economic history on the one hand, and the growing presence of ethnographic objects and anthropological approaches in historical studies on the other. The thinking about material culture in Europe has profoundly changed with the integration of the global turn. From considering European material culture only from within a tightly bordered European perspective, approaches have shifted to not only identifying the ubiquity of non-European goods within European material landscapes but also recognising the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between European and non-European. European material culture is now understood to be full of traces that lead back to empire, colonial oppression, and the exploitation of labour. It includes objects that that were created elsewhere for European consumers, objects that were brought to Europe by collectors and (scientific) explorers, as well as European-made objects consumed and/or recreated in other parts of the world.

The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This chapter distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations – and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

The historical profession emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of the nation-state. Historians of the modern period in particular focused above all on the political history of nation-states and the diplomatic history of relations between them. Global aspects of European history were covered mainly in terms of Europe’s impact on other parts of the world, as in Hobsbawm’s “dual revolution” (the worldwide repercussions of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), or the history of Europe’s colonial possessions overseas. And yet there were demonstrable global influences on many key developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, from the liberalism of the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s to the economic impact of the cotton-growing slave economies of the American South. The globalization processes of the late twentieth century have brought these into sharper focus and powered an approach that places Europe’s history in a broader global context of mutual interaction. Yet the nation-state is not dead, and national governments are vigorously promoting a return to national histories in the service of patriotic education. Global history is here to stay, but its place in the educational system, particularly school curricula, remains heavily contested.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments and findings and argues for a global and synchronic study of the Spanish Empire to shed light on the nature and limits of imperial power and colonialism and their specific implementation, particularly in the case of Latin America.

The introduction presents the main arguments and topics discussed throughout the book. It also sketches some critical characteristics of early modern Spanish officials and the global Spanish Empire. Furthermore, it discusses the book’s methodological and theoretical approaches, particularly the challenges of writing a global history from the margins.

The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope and familiarizes the reader with the history of Angang and industrial Manchuria. In the process, it positions Mao-era China within multiple bodies of scholarship: The global history of late industrialization; the transnational history of Manchuria; the intersection of geopolitics and technological transfers; and the study of state-owned enterprises in China.