Description
Book SynopsisA Companion to World History presents over 30 essays from an international group of historians that both identify continuing areas of contention, disagreement, and divergence in world and global history, and point to directions for further debate.
Trade Review“This new volume offers insightful reflections by both leading and emerging world historians on approaches, methodologies, arguments, and pedagogies of a sub-discipline that has continued to be in flux as well as in need of defining itself as a relevant alternative to the traditional national, regional, or chronological fields of inquiry.” (
Choice, 1 August 2013)
"The focus...on the practicalities of how to do world history probably gives it its edge. Its thirty-three chapters are grouped into sections that address how to set up research projects in world history, how to teach it, how to get jobs in it, how to frame it, and how it is done in various parts of the globe. It is an actual handbook, in other words, as opposed to a sample of exemplary work." (
English Historical Review, 1 February 2014)
"All in all, A Companion to World History is a first-rate and cutting-edge contribution to the field of world history. It also contains a large and up-to-date bibliography. Serious scholars in the field will want to add it to their collection of basic reference books. It also belongs in every research library." (Buchbesprechungen 2016)
Table of ContentsList of Maps, Figures, and Tables x
Notes on Contributors xi
Editor’s Acknowledgments xviii
Introduction: The Challenge of World History 1
Douglas Northrop
PART I TRAJECTORIES AND PRACTICES 13
1 World History: Departures and Variations 15
Kenneth Pomeranz and Daniel A. Segal
2 Why and How I Became a World Historian 32
Dominic Sachsenmaier
Researching the world: techniques and methods 43
3 Becoming a World Historian: The State of Graduate Training in World History and Placement in the Academic World 45
Heather Streets-Salter
4 The World Is Your Archive? The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research 63
Barbara Weinstein
5 What Are the Units of World History? 79
Adam McKeown
Teaching the world: publics and pedagogies 95
6 Meetings of World History and Public History 97
Leslie Witz
7 Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History 111
Robert B. Bain
8 Teaching World History at the College Level 128
Trevor Getz
PART II CATEGORIES AND CONCEPTS 141
Framing 142
9 Environments, Ecologies, and Cultures across Space and Time 143
I.G. Simmons
10 Deep Pasts: Interconnections and Comparative History in the Ancient World 156
Norman Yoffee
11 Big History 171
Fred Spier
12 Global Scale Analysis in Human History 185
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall
13 Region in Global History 201
Paul A. Kramer
14 Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World 213
Anne Gerritsen
Comparing 227
15 Comparative History and the Challenge of the Grand Narrative 229
Michael Adas
16 The Science of Difference: Race, Indo-European Linguistics, and Eurasian Nomads 244
Xinru Liu
17 Projecting Power: Empires, Colonies, and World History 258
Mrinalini Sinha
18 The Body in/as World History 272
Antoinette Burton
19 Benchmarks of Globalization: The Global Condition, 1850–2010 285
Charles Bright and Michael Geyer
Connecting 301
20 Networks, Interactions, and Connective History 303
Felipe Fernández-Armesto with Benjamin Sacks
21 Objects in Motion 321
Scott C. Levi
22 People in Motion 339
Kerry Ward
23 Religious Ideas in Motion 352
Karin Vélez, Sebastian R. Prange, and Luke Clossey
24 Diseases in Motion 365
Martin S. Pernick
25 Bullets in Motion 375
Stephen Morillo
PART III MANY GLOBES: WHO WRITES THE WORLD? 389
26 The World from Oceania 391
Damon Ieremia Salesa
27 The World from China 405
Weiwei Zhang
28 Historicizing the World in Northeast Asia 418
Jie-Hyun Lim
29 Writing Global History in Africa 433
David Simo
30 Islamicate World Histories? 447
Huri Islamoğlu
31 The World from Latin America and the Peripheries 464
Eduardo Devés-Valdés
32 (Re)Writing World Histories in Europe 478
Katja Naumann
33 Other Globes: Shifting Optics on the World 497
Douglas Northrop
Bibliography 527
Index 576
