Historisk tidskrift 126:2 • 2006
Innehåll (Contents) 2006:2
Uppsatser (Articles)
Den internationella historiens uppgång och fall Trender inom
svensk internationell historieforskning 1950–2005
Stefan Eklöf Amirell
Fulltext (pdf)
Summary
The Rise and Decline of International History: Trends in
Swedish International Historical Research, 1950–2005
This article investigates how Swedish historical research on
international subjects has fluctuated since the mid-twentieth
century. It does so by looking at the share of doctoral theses
on international topics as well as the share of essays dealing
with international subjects in Historisk tidskrift and the research
interests of Sweden’s 46 current professors in history. The interest
in international history expanded in the 1960s and, especially,
in the 1970s, when more than a quarter of all doctoral theses
and more than a third of the essays in Historisk tidskrift were
concerned with international subject matters. The expansion in
the 1970s was mainly due to a rising interest in non-European
history, influenced by contemporary international developments
in the post-war era. This interest declined in the following
decade, but was partly offset by a rising interest in European
history, especially at Lund University.
In contrast to non-European
history, European history managed to establish itself within
the history discipline towards the end of the twentieth century
and is relatively well represented among the country s professors
in history today. No professor, however, has a primary or even
secondary interest in non-European history. The failure of non-European
history to consolidate its position can be explained by a combination
of structural factors, including the allocation of research funding
in the 1990s and the system for evaluating academic qualifications,
as well as alienation on the part of Swedish historians interested
in non- European history.
In the first years of the twenty-first century, the share of
doctoral theses on international (both European and non-European)
topics declined even further. The intense debates about, and
criticism against, the history discipline in Sweden in the 1990s
led to an increased focus on popular publications about Swedish
history, and, moreover, the 1997 reform of the Swedish post-graduate
education system caused some history departments to become more
restrictive in admitting post-graduate candidates interested
in subjects outside the departments main research areas. The
rising interest in globalisation studies in the social sciences
in the past decades, on the other hand, has tended to regard
longer historical perspectives as irrelevant, thereby marginalising
the history discipline. Despite the increasing importance of
global processes and transnational phenomena, therefore, Swedish
historians have a stronger focus on national history today than
at any point in time since the middle of the last century.
Keywords
historiography, history of education
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