Abstract

What are the benefits of engaging with “World/Global History” and “World Literature,” now, at beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, and for future readers of this volume? Which human values and institutions are at stake, that necessitate critical interventions in history and literature—two of the most important arts that document the shared and the unshared of our collective humanity—on the worldly stage, a global scale? This afterword addresses these questions through an analysis of Friedrich von Schiller's inaugural lecture (1789) at the University of Jena, “The Nature and Value of Universal History.” The work of a philosopher of “universal history,” a term Schiller interchangeably uses with “world history,” is to recognize and draw the interconnections between fragments. A century and a half after Schiller's inaugural lecture, without any references to him, in another part of the world, a lawyer, politician, and one of the main leaders of an important anti-colonial movement revisited the question of world history. In Glimpses of World History, first written as a series of letters between October 1930 and August 1933 to his daughter Indira while being imprisoned by the British government, Jawaharlal Nehru presents an entirely different account of the nature and value world history

Keywords: Friedrich von Schiller; Universal History; Jawaharlal Nehru; Glimpses of World History