Prasenjit Duara & Viren Murthy 
A Companion to Global Historical Thought 

A COMPANION TO GLOBAL HISTORICAL THOUGHT

A Companion to Global Historical Thought provides an overview of the development of historical thinking from the earliest times to the present, directly addressing issues of historiography in a globalized context. Questions concerning the global dissemination of historical writing and the relationship between historiography and other ways of representing the past have become important not only in the academic study of history, but also in public arenas in many countries. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book considers the problem of ‘the global’ – in the multiplicity of traditions of narrating the past; in the global dissemination of modern historical writing; and of ‘the global’ as a concept animating historical imaginations. It explores the different intellectual approaches that have shaped the discipline of history, and the challenges posed by modernity and globalization, while illustrating the shifts in thinking about time and the emergence of historical thought.

Complementing A Companion to Western Historical Thought, this book places non-Western perspectives on historiography at the center of discussion, helping scholars and students alike make sense of the discipline at the start of the twenty-first century.

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1

Part I Premodern Historical Thought 19

1 History as a Way of Remembering the Past: Early India 21
Romila Thapar

2 Classical Chinese Historical Thought 34
Michael Puett

3 The Romance of the Middle Ages: Discovering the Past in Early Modern Japan 47
Thomas Keirstead

4 Buddhist Worlds 63
Ian Harris

5 Premodern Arabic/Islamic Historical Writing 78
Tarif Khalidi

6 Ottoman Historical Thought 92
Gottfried Hagen and Ethan L. Menchinger

7 ‘Premodern’ Pasts: South Asia 107
Rosalind O’Hanlon

8 History, Exile, and Counter-History: Jewish Perspectives 122
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin

Part II Historiographies 137

9 The Legacy of Greece and Rome 139
Freyja Cox Jensen

10 America and Global Historical Thought in the Early Modern Period 153
Karen Ordahl Kupperman

11 European Societies and their Norms in the Process of Expansion: The Iberian Cases 169
Jean-Frédéric Schaub

12 The Global in Enlightenment Historical Thought 184
Jennifer Pitts

13 Hegel, Marx, and World History 197
Andrew Sartori

14 The World of Modern Japanese Historiography: Tribulations and Transformations in Historical Approaches 213
Curtis Anderson Gayle

15 Critical Theories of Modernity 228
Viren Murthy

16 On the Compatibility of Chinese and European History: A Marxist Approach 243
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik

17 Modern Historiography in Southeast Asia: The Case of Thailand’s Royal-Nationalist History 257
Thongchai Winichakul

18 Historical Thought in the Other America 269
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

19 Histories of History in South Asia 293
Prathama Banerjee

20 Modern Historiography – Arab World 308
Alexis Wick

21 The Burden of Peculiarity: History and Historical Thought in Africa 321
Andreas Eckert

Part III G lobal Histories and New Directions 335

22 Oceanic History 337
Michael Pearson

23 Environmental History and World History: Parallels, Intersections, and Tensions 351
Kenneth Pomeranz

24 Dependency Theory and World-Systems Analysis 369
Ravi Arvind Palat

25 Empires and Imperialism 384
Prasenjit Duara

26 Histories of Globalization(s) 399
Michael Lang

27 Comparative History and Its Critics: A Genealogy and a Possible Solution 412
George Steinmetz

28 Women, Gender, and the Global 437
Bonnie G. Smith

29 Indigenes and Settlers (Fourth World) 451
Lorenzo Veracini

30 History, Memory, Justice 466
Klaus Neumann

31 Beyond the Nation: Textbook Controversies and Contestations in a Globalizing World 482
Hanna Schissler

Index 496

About the author

Prasenjit Duara is the Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of the Asia Research Institute as well as Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at National University of Singapore. He is the author of Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), which won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, USA.

Viren Murthy is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where he specializes in Modern Chinese and Japanese intellectual history. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (2011).

Andrew Sartori is Associate Professor of History at New York University, USA. He is co-editor of Global Intellectual History (with Samuel Moyn, 2013), the author of Bengal in Global Concept History (2008), and co-editor of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial (with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar, 2007). He is also co-editor of the journal Critical Historical Studies.