070143 SE Seminar - From Local to Big History: Comparing World Systems (2021S)

The chief objective of this seminar is to discuss and develop new methods for a Global History as if people mattered. They do matter especially due to the present Covid-19 related risks and the perils of the Lockdowns, not only in the fields of public health. Therefore, Global History is urgently requested to make people fit to meet the challenges of the world of tomorrow, but as a discipline Global History is itself required to get fit for doing so.

Anyway, in the early days of Global Historiography, when teachers who are now working in colleges or schools had been students themselves, the school of Global History was a matter of “High Theory”. Conventional historians found it difficult to cope with these macro-sociological approaches. In the meanwhile, Global History itself rose in reputation and relevance. The first almost global pandemics, the Black Death had an impact on Europe and Asia in the long run, which is still poorly understood, but crucial for the pre-European non-planetary World System. Therefore, a growing number of scholars having intellectually dwelled in each one’s specific allotment garden (Schrebergarten), are now starting to cope with the fact that each and every allotment garden is situated on the same planet: How do global processes affect local life and local history and vice versa? A decade or so ago, Austrian ecologic farmers started to get connected with indigenous people running their agricultural areas of pristine crop diversity overseas frequently against all odds. Under the label “Alliance for climate” these networks are promoting decarbonized farming with open source seeds in the interest of food sovereignty as their alternatives to deforestation and mono-cultivation. Such peer-to-peer networks belong to a category for which the term had been coined.

This Global History seminar ventures to trace the links between local, regional and global affairs by the novel “Google Earth approach” to World System research. “Google Earth” allows to see the globe on both, the planetary scale and that of the allotment garden, it is just a question of the “eye’s altitude”. Technically this is possible thanks to the digital globe’s fractal geometry which makes hidden dimensions visible at a lower eye’s altitude in specific regions, still a part of the globe. The same way we will trace the fractal dimensions of Global History, i.e. Global History as if people mattered. The historian’s variable “eye altitude” allows to understand Glocality as an effect of the hitherto little understood fractal dimension of Global History viz. World Systems. These dimensions will be traced by:
- Combining different scales among actors of global history (communities, countries, civilizations, ethnoscapes etc. you name it)
- Combining spatial dimensions of smaller World systems at different historical periods in time, from episodic events, cyclical conceptions of time or structurally moulded periods of time (longue durée), for instance: The European expansion since 1492 which did not really matter to China until the 19th century.
- Elaborating a historical view on the world from another or specific region’s point of view with its specific chronology (schemes of periodization) ruptures and developments (e.g. Eastern European, East Asian, Southeast Asian, Indian Ocean trade diaspora perspective etc.)