Current Approaches to Global History - Budapest Lecture Series
Many historians have serious doubts about comparative history, particularly about global comparison. It has been argued that global comparison necessarily views the world through the prism of one region, using one cultural standard to measure others. Profound cultural differences are buried under bland general clichés, or forced into rigid typologies and teleologies. Indeed, after the cultural turn the effort to define patterns of behaviour shared by people in many places and periods has found few outspoken advocates. Most global historians nowadays focus on connections and exchanges; they examine the process of globalisation. Global comparative history, conversely, mostly deals with the ‘divergence’ debate: when and why did the West obtain its marked advantage? These two very different forms of global history therefore usually deal with only a limited number of cases: either the zones connected by the traffic of people, goods, and ideas, or the winners and near-winners of the global economic contest. They are global in inspiration rather than in scope.
In my talk I will explain the motives and design of my Dynasties. A Global History of Power 1300-1800. The book is a statement about the enduring relevance of comparison, and an experiment in resolving some of the problems of global comparison. What makes dynasty a suitable theme? Which questions can be asked at a global level? And how can it be helpful to compare African chiefdoms without script with the Chinese empire, in terms of scale and development as well as the immense difference in source materials? What criteria did I use to select my cases? Why could a book along these lines not have been written one or two decades ago? Finally, can this method be applied to other themes?
I will illustrate these questions with examples and outcomes, outlining some of the book’s main themes and questions about rulers, dynasties, courts and their place in the realm at large.
Jeroen Duindam is Professor of Early Modern History at Leiden University. Duindam combines history and anthropology in his comparative work on courts, rulers and elites. His publications include a detailed comparative monograph on the Austrian Habsburg and Bourbon courts, Vienna and Versailles. The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals c. 1550-1780 (Cambridge 2003, Spanish, Italian and Japanese translations). His recent Dynasties. A Global History of Power 1300-1800 (Cambridge 2015) is an experiment in comparative history, integrating numerous cases from all continents in a global social history of rulership. Currently Duindam prepares a Very Short Introduction on Dynasty for Oxford University Press, adding ancient and contemporary examples.
The event is part of the Current Approaches to Global History - Budapest Lecture Series. The lecture series is organized by the conveners in prospect of the upcoming Fifth European Congress on World and Global History convened by the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH), hosted at CEU and at Corvinus University of Budapest in August 31-September 3, 2017 and devoted to the topic of Ruptures, Empires, Revolutions.