Global history locates national histories in the context of broader processes, in which the West is not necessarily synonymous with progress. And yet it often suffers from the same Eurocentrism that plagues national history, accepting Western categories and values uncritically and largely ignoring non-English historiographies. Alessandro Stanziani examines these tensions and asks what global history is and ought to be. Drawing upon a wide array of sources, he historicizes global history writing from the sixteenth century onward, tracing the forces of revolution, globalization, totalitarianism, colonization, decolonization and the Cold War. By considering global history in the context of a longue durée, multipolar perspective, this book assesses the strengths and limits of the field, and clarifies what is at stake.
Eurocentrism means seeing the world in Europe's terms and through European eyes; while this may not seem so unreasonable to Europeans, this perspective has unforeseen consequences. Eurocentric history implies that scientific modernity has diffused outwards from Europe to the benefit of the rest of the world, through colonialism and later development aid; it involves the imposition of European norms on places and times where they are often quite inappropriate. This book brings together respected scholars from history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy, and from different geographical perspectives, who explore and critically analyse manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of Europe's past. The collection investigates the role imaginings of the European past since the 18th Century played in the construction of a Europeanist world view and the ways in which 'Europe' was constructed in literature and art.
In the first book to trace the Russian state’s citizenship policy throughout its history, Lohr argues that to understand the citizenship dilemmas Russia faces today, we must return to the less xenophobic and isolationist pre-Stalin period—before the drive toward autarky after 1914 eventually sealed the state off from Europe.
Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the international systems that traditionally existed in Europe, East Asia, pre-Columbian Central and South America, Africa and Polynesia. The second part discusses the ways in which these international systems were brought into contact with each other through the agency of Mongols in Central Asia, Arabs in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, Indic and Sinic societies in South East Asia, and the Europeans through their travels and colonial expansion. The concluding section concerns contemporary issues: the processes of decolonization, neo-colonialism and globalization – and their consequences on contemporary society. History of International Relations provides a unique textbook for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations, and anybody interested in international relations theory, history, and contemporary politics.
The past is not just, as has been famously said, another country with foreign customs: it is a contested and colonized terrain. Indigenous histories have been expropriated, eclipsed, sometimes even wholly eradicated, in the service of imperialist aims buttressed by a distinctly Western philosophy of history. Ranajit Guha, perhaps the most influential figure in postcolonial and subaltern studies at work today, offers a critique of such historiography by taking issue with the Hegelian concept of World-history. That concept, he contends, reduces the course of human history to the amoral record of states and empires, great men and clashing civilizations. It renders invisible the quotidian experience of ordinary people and casts off all that came before it into the nether-existence known as "Prehistory." On the Indian subcontinent, Guha believes, this Western way of looking at the past was so successfully insinuated by British colonization that few today can see clearly its ongoing and pernicious influence. He argues that to break out of this habit of mind and go beyond the Eurocentric and statist limit of World-history historians should learn from literature to make their narratives doubly inclusive: to extend them in scope not only to make room for the pasts of the so-called peoples without history but to address the historicality of everyday life as well. Only then, as Guha demonstrates through an examination of Rabindranath Tagore's critique of historiography, can we recapture a more fully human past of "experience and wonder."
As the first survey of the history of women in Russia to be published in any language, this book is itself an historic event -- the result of the collaboration of the leading Russian and American specialists on Russian women's history. The book is divided in to four chronological parts corresponding to eras of Russian history: (I) Kievan/Mongol (10th - 15th centuries); (II) Muscovite ( 16th - 17th centuries); (III) 18th century; and (IV) 19th - early 20th centuries. Each part gives coverage to four main topics: (1) The role of prominent women in public life, with biographical sketches of women who attained prominence in political or cultural life; (2) Women's daily life and family roles; (3) Women's status under the law; (4) Material culture and in particular women's dress as an expression of their place in society.
Eurocentrism remains a prevailing feature of Western-dominated social scientific perspectives, tending to ignore alternative views originating outside the West and thus maintaining a form of scholarly hegemony. As such, there is an urgent need to reconsider Eurocentrism in social science, to ask whether it constitutes an obstacle to understanding social problems and whether it is possible to go beyond Eurocentrism in the construction of reliable, more universal knowledge. At the same time, certain questions persist, particularly with regard to the extent to which recent revisionist challenges have really contributed to the surmounting of Eurocentric domination, and whether the constant repetition of the concept serves to reinforce it. This book engages with the central problems of Eurocentrism in the social sciences, bringing together the work of scholars from around the world to offer a critique of this perspective from both European and non-European positions, thus shedding light on the binaries that often come into being in debates in this field. Thematically organised and addressing a range of questions, including Eurocentrism in historical studies, in the understanding of religion and civilisation and in the study of international relations, as well as in the institutionalisation and professionalisation of research and discourses on modernisation in the Middle East, Eurocentrism at the Margins will appeal to scholars with interests in knowledge production and circulation, and Eurocentrism and post-colonialism in the social sciences.
`Scientific history of philosophy' was one of the professional branches of Soviet philosophy, and a place where philosophical culture was preserved in an often hostile environment. Situated between the ideological exigencies of the Soviet system with its Marxist-Leninist `theoretical foundation' and the need for an objective account of philosophy's past, Soviet history of philosophy displays the characteristic features of Soviet philosophy as a whole, including a forceful reappearance of its Hegelian background. This book is the only Western monograph on this important part of Soviet philosophy, thus filling the last main gap in Western `Philosophical Sovietology'. At the same time, it offers the first survey of Soviet philosophy after the disappearance of the Soviet system itself, embarking on an historical and meta-philosophical investigation of Soviet philosophical culture. The book will be of interest to students of Soviet and Russian philosophy, historians of philosophy and specialists in Soviet studies.
In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography. Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University).
