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Historisk tidskrift 130:4 • 2010

Innehåll (Contents) 2010:4

Uppsatser (Articles)

Globalhistoria och forskning om långa förlopp

Av Arne Jarrick & Janken Myrdal

 

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Summary

Global history and the longue durée

The mission of this article is to advocate, define, explain, and offer some empirical examples of global history. The advocacy follows two lines. First, since human affairs have gradually turned global, in the moral and ideological sense as much as in economic life, historians should refashion their scientific endeavours from the national to the global. Second, provided that historians still wish to explain the destiny of humankind and not only describe it as faithfully as possible, they simply have to break out of the methodological and thematic nationalism that has been the hallmark of their enterprise for too long. And explaining human history requires that global and secular processes are addressed in concert. Applying a long-term global perspective may enable us to realize the significance of slow and rapid diffusion of profound human cultural phenomena, and to distinguish such processes from locally produced cultural traits.

Aiming at uncovering and explaining general patterns of human history by studying global processes over the very long run, implies that history cannot be seen as contingent, but, basically, as a process with a certain course, and that history will never recommence where it once started.

Against this backdrop the question whether the trajectory of human history resembles an evolutionary process is discussed but not conclusively settled. On the one hand, since our history is a process of slowly emerging and waning forms of social life, where certain traits are selected at the expense of others, it does resemble an evolutionary process. On the other hand, since the destiny of mankind is to a substantial degree the outcome of deliberate human choice, self-reflection and, therefore, of agency exceeding pure behaviour, it does not.

In the concluding section two examples are presented of what could be accomplished by a global and secular approach to history: the history of empires, and the history of law codes. Aside from the substantive matters themselves, a couple of methodological issues, peculiar to global history, are addressed.

Keywords

Global history, empires, law codes, source criticism