Global Intellectual History

Not having been based in the nation state intellectual history it is perhaps less obvious immediately what the addition of the ‘global’ aspect adds. However, intellectual history has predominantly focussed on western thought and often only connected it to the global context in terms of influence and dominance and it is this that intellectual global history seeks to address. Different approaches could be taken to global intellectual history-global structuring the historian’s research of intellectual history, the history of ideas related to the global, or the discussion of global processes. This last method could be seen as a form of transnational history and would not necessarily have to have a global reach, but simply not be as prescriptive as to the units which were being studied. An important part of global intellectual history would be to study non-western history which would draw attention to areas previously ignored, but rather than simply talking about concepts and cultures as discrete or through influence or dominance this could also be part of a nuanced understanding of global history which focussed on hybridity and the development of ideas through interactions between groups. This smaller focus on interactions and on historical understanding of categories may provide an opportunity to study ‘lived experience’ which can be lacking from other forms of global history such as those which take a more comparative approach. A study of connections could include study of networks or individuals especially, given the importance of language in global intellectual history, those who effectively act as mediators between cultures through involvement in translation. A comparative approach could look at intellectual processes in different parts of the world. Presumably the study of individual concepts would lend itself more to connected histories due to the difficulty of studying concepts which are embedded in their cultural and linguistic context and a comparative approach presumes a limited amount of connection. Global intellectual history may face difficulties in its requirement for working across different languages, the impossibility of understanding other individuals view on the world, and the difficulty of understanding multiple influences, but is a necessary part of understanding how the process of understanding interactions across groups, which is a motivating factor for people studying global history, itself has a history.