‘Circulation’ is currently one of the most widely employed words in the language of global history and the history of globalization; it is commonly, even routinely used throughout the field and beyond. Amorphous in its usages and protean in its semantics,Footnote 1 in the jargon of many students of globalization, both historical and present-day, ‘circulation’ has come to describe virtually any sort of movement, transmission, or passage. As Philipp Sarasin and Andreas B. Kilcher put it, from the 1990s it became a ‘catch-word for all kinds of processualities and transfers’.Footnote 2 But, while many historians use ‘circulation’, only a few of them talk about using it. Like other popular keywords in the language of global history and the history of globalization – think only of ‘flow’ or ‘connectivity’ – ‘circulation’ is often employed ‘in a nearly unaware fashion’, as Stuart A. Rockefeller put it in relation to ‘flow’, even in passing or in an ancillary manner, ‘as if its use was so innocuous as to call for no special mention’.Footnote 3 It is generally acknowledged, and by now far beyond the precincts of linguistic theory and philosophy, that words shape cognition, and vice versa; but practitioners of global history, even though the field has long settled into acceptance and even prominence, still rarely engage in methodological and theoretical debates on their own terminology.
This article asks how ‘circulation’ came ‘into vogue and become prominent metaphorically’ in ‘global’ history;Footnote 4 it seeks to comprehend the word’s temptation and appeal, as well as the consequences of its ascendancy, in terms of both the risks it holds for the field and its qualities and potential. To that end, the article examines uses of the word ‘circulation’ in global history scholarship written in the English language over the past few years, and traces the semantic changes and the various historically given associations underlying them. The article relies on a wide body of ‘primary sources’ to grasp current variation in uses of the term. Though global history monographs are, of course, relevant to the discussion, in order to be able to systematize the range of meanings that ‘circulation’ has assumed, the article primarily examines uses of the word in a set number of issues in three journals: the Journal of World History, the Journal of Global History (two of the foremost history journals to have embraced global and world history in recent decades), and, as a sort of cross-check, the history of science, medicine, and technology journal Isis.
In these journals, ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, occurred in 42%, 52%, and 37% of the articles published between 2009 and 2016 respectively: in 63 of 150 articles in the Journal of World History in the issues that came out between March 2009 and December 2016, and in 81 of 155 articles in the Journal of Global History in the issues that came out between March 2009 and November 2016. ‘Circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, was used somewhat more sparingly in the journal Isis, where they occurred in 97 out of 260 articles in the issues that came out between March 2009 and December 2016 – or fewer, were we to omit ‘focus’ sections dedicated to a new, global history of science, where ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, occurred in as many as 85% of the articles.Footnote 5 In all three cases, reviews, front or back matter texts, letters to the editor, editorial introductions, frontispieces, and similar material were excluded from the count.Footnote 6
Many global historians publish in languages other than English, and ‘circulation’ is widely employed in much of the non-English-language global history scholarship. This article focuses on English-language publications both for reasons of feasibility and because of English’s particular status as the field’s common language – in fact, the authors of several of the publications cited in the following are non-native speakers who have chosen to publish in English.
Relying on historical studies of the ‘circulation’ discourse in past societies,Footnote 7 on scholarship that makes the language of global history and the history of globalization its study,Footnote 8 and on studies of other popular keywords in the language of globalization – in particular, Stuart A. Rockefeller’s remarkable 2011 article on the keyword ‘flow’, a critical discussion of anthropologists’ use of the term – the article traces the varied denotations and connotations of ‘circulation’. It suggests that the word’s vicissitudes may ultimately be as pertinent as its present ubiquity: its many meanings and associations evidently serve a purpose, though one largely unacknowledged and, perhaps, unrecognized in the field. It argues that the popularity of ‘circulation’ may be attributable to how, in a merger of two of its qualities, its seeming ‘untainted-ness’ and openness, on the one hand, and on the other, the resonance of older, medical and economic, meanings in its usages, it is able to convey a sense of entity, that is, independent existence, for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of directedness, self-reliance – that is, an evacuation of agency – and ‘liquidity’ for the movements it describes.
Old wine in a new bottle
Of the articles surveyed, 84% (that is, 53 out of 63 that use ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, in the Journal of World History and 68 out of 81 that rely on those terms in the Journal of Global History) – deploy the word broadly as a synonym for transmission, spread, and dissemination, of anything from writings or persons to concepts or artefacts. Authors refer to the ‘circulation’ of booksFootnote 9 or of the ‘language of cosmopolitan theory’,Footnote 10 of ‘the Heroic Guerilla image and ideas associated with Che’,Footnote 11 of ‘ideas between European colonial powers’,Footnote 12 of ‘illuminated Koran manuscripts … in Sana’a’,Footnote 13 or of stories ‘to London via Reuters agents in St. Petersburg, Constantinople, Philippopolis, and Teheran’.Footnote 14 In some of these references, ‘circulation’ explicitly takes the meaning of a linear, one-way passage: authors refer to ‘the circulation of luxury goods toward the hinterland’,Footnote 15 to how ideas about ‘rural reconstruction’ circulated ‘from New Deal agencies and US philanthropies to missionaries, nationalists, and British colonial administrators’,Footnote 16 or to how ‘what is forged at the periphery circulate(s) back to the core’.Footnote 17 ‘Circulation’ is employed in like manner in related fields, broadly with the meaning of ‘dissemination’. In the journal Isis, in 78 out of 97 mentions, authors use the term to refer to the ‘circulation’ of ‘stories’,Footnote 18 of ‘new research findings’,Footnote 19 of ‘a memorandum to federal patent officials’,Footnote 20 ‘of reagents, techniques, and researchers’,Footnote 21 or of ‘metaphors and models’.Footnote 22
Transmission, spread, and dissemination is, in fact, one literal meaning of ‘circulation’. Around 1700, ‘circulation’ expanded semantically and came to denote ‘the transmission or passage of anything’, from money to news, ‘from hand to hand, or from person to person’, and, as the Oxford English dictionary states, ‘dissemination or publication, whether by transmission from one to another, or by distribution or diffusion of separate copies’.Footnote 23 The manner in which many global historians and their counterparts in related fields use ‘circulation’ is thus essentially literal language, seemingly outside any figure of speech, and, superficially at least, one that carries no theoretical, historical, or ideological weight.
The word’s apparent impartiality and innocuousness may well be an important part of its appeal, especially since ‘circulation’ has occasionally come to replace more partial and less innocent terms. At some points in the articles under consideration, ‘circulation’ is employed virtually synonymously with what previous generations of historians would have referred to as ‘diffusion’. When authors refer, for instance, to how ‘ideas from abroad’ circulated in Latin America,Footnote 24 how management concepts and strategies ‘were circulated’ through American ‘migrant engineers’ ‘around the globe’,Footnote 25 or how ‘the Chinese prison and penal reform in the early twentieth century was part of a global circulation of Western institutions and practices and signified China’s entry into the modern era’,Footnote 26 one can hardly refrain from suggesting the possibility that ‘circulation’ has, in some instances at least, replaced the term ‘diffusion’, tainted, and discredited, by its association with Eurocentrism.Footnote 27 Frederick Cooper once pointed out that historians, while seeking emancipation from the weaknesses and teleology of the concept of modernization, have sometimes replaced terminologies but perpetuated meaning: tradition is now referred to as isolation, modernity as entanglement, and, one is tempted to add, the peripheral as the local.Footnote 28 If ‘circulation’ as a terminology is replacing ‘diffusion’, but, at the same time, perpetuating the old meaning – that is, if by using ‘circulation’ we are merely paying lip service to a novel agenda but not actually challenging underlying assumptionsFootnote 29 (in this case, the assumption that knowledge, technology or ideas are ‘created locally and then … transferred outward toward more general contexts’Footnote 30 ) – we had much better speak plainly.
The globe as a closed system
The seeming innocuousness of ‘circulation’ is deceptive in yet another way: namely, in that open-ended, unidirectional dissemination is but one of the word’s many meanings, and that an older linguistic background reverberates in global historians’ usage of the word in a manner that is significant and yet not immediately discernible. To this day, despite the term’s prevalence in the humanities, ‘circulation’ is primarily associated with the field of economics on the one hand, and with biology, anatomy, and physiology, in particular the cardiovascular system, on the other. A simple search in a general encyclopaedia will make it abundantly clear that ‘circulation’, in a large part of a modern audience’s imagination, outside a small circle of scholars in the humanities and social sciences, denotes primarily a biological process, to quote The new encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘by which nutrients, respiratory gases, and metabolic products are transported throughout a living organism’,Footnote 31 and second, an economic process, by which wealth is being generated through circulation of money and fungible goods.Footnote 32
Even in the Journal of World History, the Journal of Global History, and Isis, in seven of the 63 articles, seven of the 81, and one of the 97 that use the word ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, respectively, the term is employed in connection with money and currency. Authors refer to the ‘circulation’ of ‘pesos’, ‘cowrie shells’, Qin coinage, ‘silver’, or other ‘exchange mediums’.Footnote 33 According to the Oxford English dictionary, forms of the word ‘circulation’ referring to currency, the context of political economy, and mercantilism, were common in English as early as the 1600s. ‘Circulation’, alongside other corporeal images, became a metaphor organizing understandings of the economic in 1651, when Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) adopted it from William Harvey’s (1578–1657) model of blood circulation, first published in 1628 in his Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (An anatomical disputation of the movement of the heart and blood in animals), and applied it to the modern tax state in his Leviathan,Footnote 34 a transfer discussed in Michel Foucault’s 1966 Les mots et les choses.Footnote 35 Working mainly from dissections and vivisections, and through insights from his observations of transport systems, Harvey had concluded that blood in the body was ‘impelled in a circle, and is in a state of ceaseless motion’, that is, that blood moved in a closed circuit.
Harvey’s meaning was consistent with the oldest usage of the term ‘circulation’, denoting circular motion or course. The word ‘circulation’ has its roots in the Latin circulatio, derived from the past participle stem of circulare, ‘to form a circle’, derived in turn from circulus, ‘small ring’, which originally referred to the ‘orbit’, the ‘circuit of a star’.Footnote 36 The first source of circular pictorializaton of recurrent or continuous processes was thus the cyclical aspect of celestial and astronomical phenomena, even though the circulation concept as an organizing perspective was soon afterwards extended to meteorological processes, the cycle of life, and, later, alchemy.Footnote 37
Historians have long argued that the circulation concept was one of many instances where medicine and economy helped create the other’s horizon of textual and conceptual possibility.Footnote 38 The fact that both fields may more recently have assisted global historians in the construction of their own premises, however, has hitherto gone largely unnoticed.Footnote 39 Several prominent scholars in the field have of late used ‘circulation’ to describe circular movement in a closed system, which encompasses ‘the possibility of the mutations and reconfigurations coming back to the point of origin’Footnote 40 or which signifies ‘a double movement of going forth and coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely’,Footnote 41 and thus have defined the term in accordance with its medical and economic meaning as a closed circular process and in deliberate contrast to that of an open ‘dissemination’ without a determined limit or boundary. As the global historian of science Kapil Raj put it recently in a discussion of the term, the value of ‘circulation’ lay precisely in that it served ‘as a strong counterpoint to the unidirectionality of “diffusion” or even of “dissemination” or “transmission”, of binaries such as metropolitan science/colonial science or center/periphery, which all imply a producer and an end user’.Footnote 42
Indeed, the notion of a closed circular process may well have been more formative and influential for global history and the history of globalization than practitioners have hitherto been wont to acknowledge. Economic historians have long argued that the circulation concept provided the ‘sense of entity necessary for the emergence of systematic economic analysis’. They contend that modern economic theory had its origin in the application of the paradigm of a closed circular process to economic life.Footnote 43 This diagnosis is certainly not straightforwardly transferable to the field of global history, but the proposition that ‘circulation’ may owe some part of its appeal, and influence, to the sense of entity it lends to, and presupposes for, the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, is well worth seizing. When global historians speak of the ‘circulation of Indian fabrics in the Atlantic world’,Footnote 44 of the ‘circulation’ of a London-based magazine ‘throughout Britain and its Empire, Europe, and the United States’,Footnote 45 of ‘a circulation of young single, male labourers throughout the British world’,Footnote 46 or of ‘the Atlantic’ as a ‘zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission’,Footnote 47 they are suggesting not only a process of dissemination but, essentially in a merger of two of the meanings of ‘circulation’, a notion of passage within a closed entity, both based on and formative of a vision of ‘the British world’, ‘the Atlantic’, or the ‘Western world’ respectively as bounded, coherent spaces. And not only does ‘circulation’ presuppose and necessitate a sense of entity for particular areas of the world. One of the reasons for the ubiquitous application of the ‘circulation’ concept in global history may well be the fact that it suggests an idea of the ‘globe’ as a closed circuit, as an organism with its own regulatory logic, that it is both premised upon and constitutive of the vision of the ‘world as a single system’ which is so tangible in general works on globalization published in the final decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 48 Part of the appeal of the term ‘circulation’, therefore, may stem from its apparent literalness, but it seems that its actual figurativeness is just as pertinent. The term may be as ever-present and as popular as it is in the language of global history because its linguistic background reverberates in global historians’ usage of the word, providing ‘the sense of entity necessary for the emergence of systematic’ globalization theory.Footnote 49 ‘Circulation’ may appeal to global historians because it suggests a vision of their object of study as a closed system.
Along the veins of the world
‘Circulation’ may appeal to practitioners of global history because it implies a vision of their terrain as a closed system, but also, in connection therewith, because it evokes a peculiar form of transmission or passage within that system, along given infrastructures, a system of ‘veins’ or vessels. Indeed, several of the articles in the Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History – 13 out of 63 and 81 respectively, that is, 21% and 16% – explicitly employ ‘circulation’ to describe the dissemination of commodities, ideas, or texts within a given network. Authors refer to ‘Manilamen’ who ‘circulated’ in a ‘global maritime network’Footnote 50 , to the ‘faster circulation of information’ in the industrial age as it was made possible by ‘new technologies like the telegraph and photograph’,Footnote 51 to how the image of the Heroic Guerrilla ‘circulated widely within European radical networks in late 1967’,Footnote 52 to ‘complex networks of Chinese pottery circulation in a regional trade network that stretched from East Africa to the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia’,Footnote 53 or to how ‘networks are … systems of circulation through which policy choices flow’.Footnote 54 Authors in the journal Isis also employ ‘circulation’ to describe movement along established veins, if somewhat more sparingly, in eight out of 97 articles (8%), speaking of the ‘role of long-distance networks in the circulation of knowledge’,Footnote 55 of ‘the circulation of products, instruments, practices, and knowledge both in North–South networks and in the South–South networks that are now expanding’,Footnote 56 of the circulation of thought ferried ‘from God through the creation to humanity and thence back to God in an unceasing circulation of spirit through matter’,Footnote 57 about how ‘a good rail system … allowed the easy circulation of people’,Footnote 58 and of ‘the development of international communication systems that allowed much more rapid circulation of scientific journals and correspondence’.Footnote 59 These passages, even though they describe both two- and one-way transmission (spirit is imagined to return to God, but neither pottery, nor images, nor journals are expected to return to their producer) – that is, even though not all authors subscribe to the meaning of circular motion or course – all conjure up a vision of maritime networks, communication channels, or the rail system as arteries, as ‘organized vessels’ that direct and regulate movement.
Stuart A. Rockefeller has argued that, ‘while the current popularity of “flow” as a keyword owes more to the image of cash flow than to that of water flowing’, it still ‘arises from watery imagery by way of the image of money moving like water’.Footnote 60 Similarly, when using ‘circulation’, the word’s historically given association with the movement of blood and other bodily fluids resonates, even though the association is rarely made explicit – the exception among the authors under consideration being Jeremy Adelman, according to whom the ‘production, circulation, and reception’ of ‘representational artefacts’, their ‘mimetic exchange’, ‘coursed through empires like blood through vessels’.Footnote 61 ‘Circulation’ conveys a peculiar vision of how Chinese pottery, heroic images, or ‘Manilamen’ supposedly moved: easily, unhindered, and smoothly, in a manner that is directed, forward, and aligned, like fluids in vessels. Indeed, that is another way in which scholars have suggested that we define ‘circulation’: as movement going on within a ‘network as a structure’,Footnote 62 as transfer occurring ‘within bounded spaces’ and systems that have their own (if potentially emerging, changing, and expanding) morphology,Footnote 63 or, as Arjun Appadurai put it, as ‘flow’ ‘along well-established circulatory paths’, shaped and governed by ‘circuits or networks’.Footnote 64 Even for Bruno Latour, whose concept of the ‘circulation’ of ‘immutable mobiles’ has significantly contributed to the term’s popularity, ‘circulation’ happens within, and is inextricably bound up with, the ‘metaphor of an actor-network’, a hybrid of the mathematical notion of network and the ‘actant’.Footnote 65
The notion of ‘circulation’ as going on within a ‘network as a structure’, as passage through ‘organized vessels’, poses a series of difficulties for the historian, however.Footnote 66 For most of us would not intuitively expect the distribution of journals, the travels of ‘Manilamen’, or the trade with fragile Chinese pottery across the African continent to be a particularly suave, unidirectional, or ‘effortless’ affair. Oftentimes, the way in which ‘circulation’ is employed not only takes our attention away from the real, presumably arduous, uneven, and non-linear, circumstances of many of these processes, but it also, potentially at least, distorts and biases our vision of them. ‘Circulation’ may be misleading, as the historian of science Fa-ti Fan phrased it, because it suggests that ‘people, information, and material objects flowed smoothly along networks and channels’, obscuring the efforts that went into transportation, the absence of ‘teleology’ in these trajectories, and the obstructions, standstills, and delays involved.Footnote 67 This is not to say that the term is invariably injurious, or that it cannot be valuable or expedient. In fact, ‘circulation’, explicitly and unambiguously defined as passage along ‘established paths’, may be a felicitous metaphor when what authors seek to describe are actually passages within a given structure, built network, or technological system, such as oceanic telegraph cables or a rail system, and if what they seek to achieve is a greater attention to the ‘infrastructures’ of transmission and passage, the ‘built networks that facilitate exchange’ across distance, and to movements that follow ‘well-established circulatory paths’.Footnote 68 It is to say, however, that the concept is not pertinent if the forms of transmission that authors seek to describe are neither directed nor aligned, and neither unhindered nor ‘suave’ at all.
The self-evidence of globalization
‘Circulation’ not only makes global processes appear smooth and unimpeded; just as Stuart A. Rockefeller has argued for the term ‘flow’, it also bestows an ‘abstract and disembodied quality’ upon the processes it is used to describe.Footnote 69 In the vast majority of the articles under consideration, ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, are employed without reference to agency: in 54 out of 63 articles in the Journal of World History and in 57 out of 81 in the Journal of Global History (86% and 70% respectively), ‘circulation’ goes without agency, without an inner motor or force. Again, this tendency is less marked in the journal Isis, where authors employ the term ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, in 48 out of 97 articles that resort to those terms (49%) without reference to agency. Authors write about the circulation ‘of personnel and ideas in … a non-governmental organization’,Footnote 70 about how ‘Marco Polo’s stories circulated in Siena’ after 1300,Footnote 71 or about how Nepal’s boundaries were ‘an unbounded space uniquely forged by flows, circulations, and movements involving human communities, ideas, objects, flora, and fauna’.Footnote 72 By taking together human actors and inanimate things, as moved by some unspecified force outside themselves, by everything but their own will, in a kind of natural, given movement, authors emphasize movement over how this movement was achieved, who caused or wanted it.Footnote 73 The tendency to emphasize movement over agency is most palpable when actors do come into play – when authors refer to how ‘the global circulation of civilizational discourse was appropriated and transformed by local actors’,Footnote 74 to how ‘brokers’ were ‘spreading the circulating imagery globally’,Footnote 75 to how ‘officials were able to control trade … by checking the internal circulation of goods’,Footnote 76 or to ‘British attempts to police the borders of colonial India against the circulation of unwanted arms, ideas, and students’Footnote 77 . ‘Circulation’, so employed, has a life of its own, with actors either going with the ‘flow’ or acting upon it from the outside.
That same tendency is writ large in the current popularity of the expression ‘in circulation’, meaning ‘in general use or currency’, ‘available, going around’, and its antonym ‘out of circulation’, ‘not in general use or currency’, withdrawn and isolated – virtual synonyms for ‘global’ and ‘local’, that which moves and that which does not, that which stays in place.Footnote 78 Authors in the Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History refer to ‘Chinese manufactures in circulation throughout Europe’,Footnote 79 ‘visual images … in widespread circulation’,Footnote 80 the ‘language of cosmopolitan theory’ as ‘in public circulation’,Footnote 81 or, conversely, to how properties were ‘blocked from circulation’.Footnote 82 Authors in the journal Isis likewise resort to the expression, discussing how ‘a scheme … was in widespread circulation’,Footnote 83 how ‘knowledge of the newly discovered mineral acids came into circulation’,Footnote 84 or how both the terms ‘“pure science” and “scientist” were in circulation’ in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 85 The verb ‘circulate’ designates both an act and an instance of circulating – that is, it is both a transitive and an intransitive verbFootnote 86 – but in the world and global history journals under consideration, with few exceptions in the particular sample assessed here, the word is used largely without reference to human agency.
Again, this usage of ‘circulation’ is not problematic per se, let alone ‘incorrect’ or improper. It may be entirely appropriate to speak of the ‘circulation’ of goods, people, or ideas without reference to agency, if what authors wish to highlight is ‘the fact of movement’Footnote 87 rather than the causes, contents, or conditions of movement. If that is not their intention, however, the tendency inherent in ‘circulation’ to downplay, and gloss over, ‘any sort of … agency’ on the side of people,Footnote 88 as Rockefeller put it for ‘flow’, and any sort of peculiarity, quality, or resistance on the side of institutions, material culture, or ideas,Footnote 89 might want to make the authors handle the term with a certain measure of diligence, and economy. Particularly at a time when historical scholarship is so preoccupied with uncovering the ‘agency’ not only of all of the world’s human beings, including its ‘subalterns’,Footnote 90 but also, across a range of disciplines from design theory to anthropology, of materiality, the physical, sensory, and functional possibilities and ‘capacities’ of materials,Footnote 91 man-made artefacts, or images,Footnote 92 ‘circulation’ may not in every case be the most appropriate term to talk about the movement of people, artefacts, and ideas.
What is more, critics of global history and the history of globalization in particular have often remarked that the field is in danger of being subservient to, providing a genealogy for, validating, and naturalizing current globalization processes, much like national historians have been subservient to the nation-state, and early historians of empire to imperialism.Footnote 93 The comparison is certainly not entirely appropriate, but the euphoria, and the kind of naturalist, ‘organic’ language used to capture movement and mobility may easily contribute to making globalization seem a natural and necessary, a self-evident, and, above all, a self-reliant process. At least from the seventeenth century, the concept of ‘circulation’ has celebrated movement as both autonomous and vital. From the verve with which French eighteenth-century hygienists advocated the necessity of the free ‘circulation’ of air in cramped cities to liberal economic discourses about the free ‘circulation’ of capital, goods, and people, the term has been employed to rejoice over movement and to depict its ‘blockage’ or ‘obstruction’ – any sort of ‘embolism’, as Jürgen Osterhammel put it in a recent critical discussion of the language of globalization – as, if not unnatural, at the very least detrimental.Footnote 94 That exultation resonates in the term’s use in the language of global history and the history of globalization today.Footnote 95 Indeed, ‘circulation’ is movement, by definition. Whereas the ‘network’, for instance, is a receptacle for movement and can subsist for any length of time without anything or anyone moving along its veins, ‘circulation’ is nothing if not (in) motion.Footnote 96
Perhaps, to overtly and roundly revert to Harvey’s conception of ‘circulation’, the model on which we are implicitly and partly already relying may provide some assistance. William Harvey’s model of blood circulation implied an understanding of the circulation system as a closed circuit, but his concept contained yet another aspect that was not actually implied by the previous meaning of ‘circulation’: the role of the heart as central pulse generator.Footnote 97 ‘Circulation’ has thus traditionally had an ‘engine’, a ‘heart’, and it may be about time that we recover this moment of agency buried in the concept and make it explicit in our use of the term. This is not to say that historians ought to revert to the idea of a system ruled by a hegemonic core; however, authors might want to pay more attention to, and designate, the ‘social behaviours’,Footnote 98 ‘practices’,Footnote 99 or sensory ‘capacities’ of materials that actuate, accelerate, or, indeed, hold up processes of ‘circulation’.
Metaphors of liquidity
Finally, ‘circulation’ is but one of many metaphors of liquids or images of dynamism and unconstrained speed – ‘flow’ is perhaps the most conspicuous one – underlying historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches to globalization today, and, like these other ‘liquid’ metaphors, it rests on a dualism, not only with actors, but also with ‘static places’, ‘settled units’, identity, or property.Footnote 100 It invokes an image of movement as perpetual and in continuum, one that has neither an identifiable origin nor an end and one that crystalizes but momentarily.Footnote 101 In that vein, authors in the Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History speak of ‘geographically circulating coalitions of capital’ in contrast to ‘sedentary “gentlemanly capitalists”, based in London’s square mile’,Footnote 102 or of how ‘the circulation of power could be altered or disrupted as it moved among different cultural traditions, bureaucracies, or individuals’Footnote 103 – a use that relates back to the work of Michel Foucault, who wrote that power ought to be thought of as ‘something that circulates’, that passes through individuals instead of being applied to them or held by some exclusively.Footnote 104 Global history monographs and edited volumes, likewise, stress the term’s usefulness in breaking with conventional spatial ‘units’ – ‘macro-regions’Footnote 105 or ‘centres’.Footnote 106 Historians reflecting on their use of the term ‘circulation’ have also often reinforced precisely this idea. The global historian of science Lissa Roberts writes, for instance, that ‘circulation’ ought to describe ‘a movement without center’, without ‘a clear and privileged point of origin and return’, a ‘continuous path whose formative trajectory is constituted out of multiple points of local contact and exchange’.Footnote 107
An approach that favours the idea of movement without a discernible origin or end is, in many respects, but the logical consequence of our defection from the dated assumption that knowledge, technology, or ideas are ‘created locally and then … transferred outward toward more general contexts’, that is, from passé notions of ‘diffusion’ and, in some measure, of ‘transfer’.Footnote 108 On the other hand, it may well also be that it is precisely the ‘liquidity’ implied in ‘circulation’ – the fact that it invokes, like ‘flow’, elusiveness, placeless-ness, and intangibility, the quality of fluids and gases that undergo a ‘continuous and irrecoverable change of position of one part of the material relative to another’Footnote 109 – that accounts for the word’s current popularity. As Stuart A. Rockefeller has pointed out, the key figures in the development of a language to capture globalization have cherished concepts invoking pure mobility and de-territorialization, because they ground and justify the ‘now-common approach to globalization’, as the erosion of identity, stasis, and place.Footnote 110
Rockefeller and others have rightly criticized the excesses of this approach for the field of anthropology and other disciplines concerned with the present, but the adoption of this ‘liquid’ terminology in the field of history poses a far more fundamental difficulty. Anthropologists and sociologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, and Manuel Castells developed the language of ‘liquidity’ explicitly to capture the rather specific experience of societies that enter the twenty-first century, as fitting metaphors to ‘grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel phase in the history of modernity’.Footnote 111 Liquidity was to them the ‘leading metaphor for the present stage of the modern era’, our ‘decidedly new’ world of electronic media, fuel-based mass transport, and a unified global capital market, in which the long effort to accelerate the speed of movement had ‘reached its “natural limit”’, in its reduction to instantaneity – not for earlier or, indeed, for ancient, medieval, or early modern societies.Footnote 112 The very word ‘globalization’ gained currency in the 1970s and 1980s, referring to ‘contemporary, ‘postcolonial’, or ‘post-Cold War’ globalization, ‘to the present-day state of the world’; it was not initially coined to imply ‘a narrative in the longue durée’.Footnote 113 As media anthropologists have pointed out, even the way in which we use the term ‘circulation’ today is profoundly influenced by the communicative logic of the new media technology; ‘circulation is a form of the cultural work of the network society’, in Manuel Castell’s sense of the term.Footnote 114 Historians, in adopting the essentially anachronistic language of globalization, bought themselves into ‘the social science mainstream’, a choice that has certainly revitalized and provided legitimacy for world history in a ‘special and up-to-date variant’, as global history, but this choice may have come at a cost. Global and world historians are now handling a repertoire of concepts ‘from social science applied to history’ that may not always be felicitous, and, if the worst comes to the worst, not even pertinent, commensurate, or ‘timely’.Footnote 115
This is not to say that global convergence is of recent invention, nor is it to say that we may not establish connections between past and present forms of worldwide communion. It is to say, however, that global historians may need to carefully discern where to apply the social science vocabulary of globalization, and to reflect on whether it is apt for the commercial networks, republics of letters, or forms of mobility and migration that they are seeking to represent – whether it adequately reflects the experience and perception of their historical subjects. Historians need not necessarily abandon their ‘liquid’ terminology altogether; it may be employed usefully where global historians actually wish to stress ‘liquidity’ – effortless movement, pure mobility, the erosion of identity and place. In other instances, however, it may be more appropriate, and more fruitful, for practitioners of global history and the history of globalization to revert to a language of precision, to name practices: to speak not of migratory ‘flows’ or the ‘circulation’ of people when it is in fact men, women, and children who walked, drowned, or dragged themselves somewhere else, limited by the speed and range of human or equine legs; to speak not of the ‘circulation’ of material culture when it is in fact about how human-made artefacts are being transported on the backs of mules, or hauled, or shattered in the process; and to speak not of the ‘circulation’ of ideas when they are in fact describing conversations, letter-writing, or book-reading – for, as Peter Dear put it, the metaphor of ‘circulation’ fails adequately to capture the movement of ideas, ‘because ideas are not like money, not even like paper money’.Footnote 116 Global history ‘demands its own intellectual foundations’, and that includes a language, and a terminology, of its own; it cannot be a ‘globalization approach projected onto the past’.Footnote 117
Conclusion
‘Circulation’, owing to its variegated semantic history, connotes a range of associative meanings, of which unidirectional dissemination, circular movement, and passage along the vessels of a closed, if potentially evolving, system are but the most relevant. Indeed, the appeal of ‘circulation’ probably arises, as Stuart A. Rockefeller has argued for ‘flow’, ‘from its sheer multiplicity’, from how it had ‘a range of meanings in common parlance for centuries, and as a result … entered the social sciences at many junctures in many contexts’.Footnote 118 As a matter of fact, the word’s overwhelming popularity at present may be attributable to a merger of its comparative ‘untainted-ness’ with its older, medical and economic, meanings, allowing it to convey a sense of independent existence for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of ‘smoothness’ and directedness, of self-reliance, as well as ‘liquidity’ and perpetuity, for the movements it describes. While it is a matter of course for words to be polysemous, for the ideas they elicit to differ according to context, and for word meanings to be fluid and in motion, variance is unsuitable for a concept that, as the various attempts at defining the term reveal, pretends to be ‘theoretical’, part of global historians’ jargon and their heuristics. Technical terminology must respect the ‘boundaries of concepts’ to be useful:Footnote 119 it ought to contain, by definition, words that, while they may not be specific to it, adopt narrower senses where those outside the group would tend to take them in a broader sense. Global history is urgently in need of a jargon in that sense – of precise, contingent concepts that are sufficiently narrow to make significant statements about their objects, ‘a differentiated vocabulary that encourages thinking about connections and their limits’.Footnote 120
For ‘circulation’ to be a useful analytic tool, it might be pertinent to limit or confine its reference: not to use it to describe distribution, diffusion, and spread – we have less equivocal words to do that – but to designate passages that occur within a closed, if evolving, system, that are, at least potentially, circular rather than strictly one-way, and to understand and bear in mind that, in using ‘circulation’, we are highlighting the fact of movement over its contents, conditions, and contingency. This does not mean that we ought to – or, indeed, possibly could – ‘standardize’ or regulate the language of the field. Rather it means that we might want to use the term ‘circulation’ bearing in mind its origins and contours; to engage, deliberately and rigorously, with the suggestive potential and associations of this and other concepts in our readers, depending on how they are used in other disciplines or how they were used historically; and to partake in the intellectual exercise of destabilizing and stabilizing, of critiquing and reconstructing, terms and concepts, for it is only thus that they will eventually gain clarity, precision, and contours. At the very least, we, as global historians, ought to be aware of, and alert to, what we gain and what we lose by resorting to words such as ‘circulation’.
Stefanie Gänger is currently assistant professor (Juniorprofessorin) at the Department for Iberian and Latin American History, University of Cologne, Germany. Her research is centred on late colonial and early republican Andean South America but inevitably requires attention to global intellectual and material connections. She recently published her first book, Relics of the past: the collecting and study of pre-Columbian antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911 (2014). She has also published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Colonial Latin American Review, and Modern Intellectual History.
