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European Social History

A Latecomer to the Global Turn?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2022

Richard Drayton
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Abstract

Why did European history come so late to the global turn? Europe’s past had of course always been constructed relative to its Islamic or Mongol peripheries, and later its colonial offshore. But only recently has it been understood that European and extra-European history are in a dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence. Intellectual and economic history recognized this before social history, which in its post-1960 flowering took it for granted that European social forms were both more advanced and categorically different from others. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a generation after political decolonization, new work began to explore the impact of peripheries on the European core, and to measure Europe from the outside. After 2000, a globalized European social history became visible. Its evasion of the constraints of the national paradigm has opened up striking new pan- and trans-European historical projects and methods. These are provoking new questions of how we might reconfigure European history in ways which understand eastern and central Europe in their own terms, rather than simply as the retarded extensions of “advanced” western European phenomena.

Résumé

Résumé

Pourquoi l’histoire européenne a-t-elle pris si tard le tournant global ? Si le passé de l’Europe s’est bien sûr toujours construit par rapport à ses périphéries islamiques ou mongoles, et plus tard par rapport à ses colonies, ce n’est que récemment que l’on a compris que l’histoire européenne et extra-européenne s’entremêlent dans une relation dynamique d’influences réciproques. L’histoire intellectuelle et économique l’a reconnu avant l’histoire sociale qui, dans son épanouissement à partir des années 1960, tenait pour acquis que les formes sociales européennes étaient à la fois plus avancées et catégoriquement différentes des autres. Dans les années 1970 et 1980 cependant, une génération après la décolonisation politique, de nouveaux travaux ont commencé à explorer l’influence des périphéries sur le noyau européen et à évaluer l’Europe de l’extérieur. Depuis le début du xxie siècle, on assiste à l’émergence d’une histoire sociale européenne globalisée. En sortant des contraintes du paradigme national, elle ouvre la voie à de nouveaux projets et méthodes historiques pan- et transeuropéens. Ceux-ci suscitent de nouvelles questions sur la façon dont nous pourrions reconfigurer l’histoire européenne de manière à comprendre l’Europe centrale et orientale selon leurs propres termes plutôt que comme de simples extensions retardées de phénomènes européens occidentaux « avancés ».

Type
Research Article
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2022

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20 See, for example, the oeuvre of David Landes or, more recently, Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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23 For an extension of this argument to include those East Europeans submitted to the “second serfdom” in the slave-capitalist complex, see Richard Drayton, “The Collaboration of Labour: Slaves, Empires and Globalizations in the Atlantic World, c. 1600–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London: W. W. Norton, 2002), 98–114, here p. 102.

24 For a devastating critique of that resistance, see Cedric J. Robinson, “Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography,” History Workshop Journal 23 (1987): 122–40.

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36 See Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Burton, ed., At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Burton, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

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43 See Pap N’Diaye, “Pour une histoire des populations noires en France : préalables théoriques,” Le mouvement social 213, no. 4 (2005): 91–108; Wulf D. Hund, Christian Koller, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., Racisms Made in Germany (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2011).

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46 For an example of what is possible from European historians sensitized to global and transnational history, see Christophe Charle, La crise des sociétés impériales. Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne (1900–1940). Essai d’histoire sociale comparée (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2001); and Christopher M. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

47 The reflections in this paragraph I owe to Christophe Charle’s response to an earlier draft of this essay, email of November 8, 2018.