Adelman’s Is Global History still possible, or has it had its moment?, Green’s The Trials of Transnationalism, and the EUI collective text For a Fair(er) Global History all grapple with the question of whether global and transnational history can survive the apparent unravelling of the liberal order that once seemed to make them possible.”
Adelman’s piece was written during a period of great crisis for globalisation, financial meltdown, retreating integration, and the return of ethnonationalism, it asks whether Global History was too closely tied to flash-in-the-pan optimism about globalising victories in the 80s and 90s. Adelman points at 2006 as the period when scholars ‘jumped’ on the new globalising world dreamed of and spearheaded by economists and politicians, a scant few years before it began to collapse. Reactionary political movements both Western and ‘Restern’ arose against this Globalism, and the ‘provincial’ elements of the West began to radicalise against the liberal cosmopolitanism that was being built, one that, to them, marginalised or even abandoned them entirely. But, he does not call for an abandonment of global frames; instead, he urges global historians to take these concerns more seriously, to engage with them and attempt to convince them, rather than accelerate ahead without them.
Green, by contrast, focuses overwhelmingly on transnationalism. She shows how the term grew and proliferated from a term used by an American politician in defence of immigrants, to a necessary weapon against ‘methodological nationalism’, a label for the cross-border nature of migration, and something near-synonymous with globalisation itself. This exact flexibility, she insists, ensures transnational history is not an ‘easy’ discipline, it demands a careful specification of scale, angles of analysis, and the connections of existing historical actors. She provides a more grounded, though perhaps at the expense of limiting its reach, use of the concept, in contrast to overly ambitious attempts to make everything ‘transnational’, and reactionary attempts to discard it entirely.
Meanwhile, the EUI seminar text goes further than either Green or Adelman in terms of philosophising Global History by arguing that it must take on a ‘fair(er)’ form. Writing during COVID, the collective authors provide a reflection on the impact that studying Global History from Zoom boxes and the hardest closed borders the world had experienced in many years had on both themselves and their understanding of it as a concept. The programme makes little attempt to provide a unique definition for Global History as a practice, and instead puts forth an argument in favour of re-balancing its focus. It argues that attempts to combat Eurocentrism have only resulted in ‘Eurasian centrism’, that further diversification in terms of references, power relations, and collaboration are necessary to provide a better, fairer, method of analysis.
Altogether, the texts argue that global and transnational history have not ‘had their moment’, but that these disciplines must adapt to the times, to critically engage with their outside detractors, and to reform its internal elements that are in need of reform.