What is the relationship between the trend towards global history and the language-specific, localized historical expertise of so-called “area studies”? How do historians of non-European societies face the challenge of global history? What kind of research agenda does the desideratum of a “global” history translate into, especially beyond the staple tale of European expansion? These types of questions brought together renowned East Asia historians from Fudan University in Shanghai, the University of Tokyo, and Princeton University in a series of conferences that have culminated in the reviewed publication. The outcome of these three-way engagements, the edited volume is one of the – in total three – sister publications ambitiously produced in a parallel manner in Japanese, Chinese and English.Footnote ¹ Their respective titles and internal arrangement differ, but the contents are identical, apart from the framing introduction written by the editor of each version, as it is by Haneda Masashi in the case of the Japanese volume.

Rather than collectively adding up to a roadmap for East Asia-based global historiography, however, the fifteen chapter-sized contributions represent the broadest variety of positions on the “global” question. Some of the authors offer general considerations on the feasibility of global history and its relation to other scales of the historian's enterprise (Ge Zhaoguang and Benjamin Elman); some seek to problematize “East Asia” as a spatial container and sketch a blueprint for a new global history productive of a sense of belonging to a global community (Haneda Masashi); some ruminate on the difficulty of practising intellectual history across multiple language archives (Federico Marcon); while others present examples of what global history applied to East Asian material might look like. These latter range from comparative literatures (Ōki Yasushi), through stories of institutional internationalization and establishment of global studies at Tokyo and Fudan universities (Satō Jin, Gu Yunshen), to case studies of text transmissions or news networks (Baba Norihisa, Paize Keulemans). A due nod is given to global history's fruitful relationship with the maritime history of seaborne traffic that integrated littoral spaces into supra-national circuits and created culturally and politically complex contact zones in port cities (Dong Shaoxin, Wang Zhenzhong). We find a fair share of histories of formative encounters, negotiations, clashes and cultural co-productions. Tineke D'Haeseleer explores how a world order is articulated by the compilers of Tang official historical records in their conceptualization of the neighbouring north-eastern polities of Koguryŏ and the Tungusic tribes of Mohe. Sheldon Garon's transnational history of East Asian thrift campaigns or Wang Xinlei's study of Chosŏn Korean state's difficulties with the Ming update of the Confucian canon both end up questioning any supposed cultural unity of East Asia as a sphere of “Confucian values”.

The impression a reader receives is that of a field still in search of the most elementary levels of consensus regarding its premises, methods and goals. What does the “global” even refer to? Is the emphasis on the scale of historical processes that span, at least potentially, the entire planet? Or rather on the connections, exchanges, formations and transformations that transgress conventional borders, territorial, cultural or linguistic? Is global history primarily a challenge to the modern nation state's pervasive claim on the exclusive custody of the past? Is it the genealogy of past attempts to grasp, theorize, narrate or rule the entire world? Or is it simply a somewhat belated attempt on the part of historians to provide the contemporary “globalization” with a pedigree? And if the answer is “all of the above”, can any single umbrella still hold such a profusion of divergent agendas?

The authors themselves sometimes appear uncertain whether this is a manageable or desirable project. Federico Marcon describes a potential global intellectual history in terms that render its pursuit nearly impossible. The assumption is that this would be some sort of history of concepts on a world scale that would need to be constructed out of material that is by default inescapably partitioned into monolingual discursive spaces. But the point is not to construct anything, only to follow the connections and interactions that are already there in the past record. Linguistic particularism is not a natural condition of intellectual activity anywhere and in any era. Marcon himself has studied a field of Edo-period authors, amateurs and collectors whose default educated register was classical Chinese, who spoke one of the many mutually barely comprehensible dialects of vernacular Japanese, wrote the stiff sōrōbun officialese of the Tokugawa administration and correspondence, and frequently read and sometimes spoke and wrote Dutch, in turn a channel for content translated from other European vernaculars. If the subjects of our interest operated on the interstices of distinct discursive spheres, it is our job as historians to follow them down that road. The complexity of the resulting intellectual and conceptual history that crosses borders, cultures and languages is the point of the study, not an “obstacle” to it.

Baba Norihisa's case sketch is a convincing retort to these sceptical ruminations. Baba traces the transmission of a single Buddhist scripture, the Karaṇḍamudrā Sūtra, from fifth-century Sri Lanka via China to ninth-century Japan, where it became the Hōkyōin daranikyō. Along its pathway around the Buddhist cosmopolis, the text accumulated myth and symbolic practices to become, among others, a tool in the assertion and consolidation of state power. In textbooks of Japanese history, one does not learn that Minamoto Yoritomo, the first shogun – the head of the warrior government that emerged from the power struggles of the twelfth century – styled himself after King Aśoka in having 84,000 miniature stūpas built and a printed copy of the Daranikyō enshrined in each of them. The implication of this modest study is that in order to understand something of importance for what we call “history of Japan”, or “history of the Kamakura shogunate”, we now have to look further afield. Namely, we need to assume that any trace we follow may not end within the territory referred to as “Japan” and inside the archive of Japanese or Chinese sources, but instead lead us as far away in time, space and language as, say, fifth-century Sri Lanka and the textual production in Pāli or Sanskrit.

A similar lesson results from Sheldon Garon's study of completely different material, that of the ideas of thrift and family economy and the concomitant practices and institutions of small-time saving supposedly productive of the self-discipline and uprightness essential to civic commitment to the national cause. Garon demonstrates how transculturally circular these patterns of emulation are. The story is neither one of an indigenous genesis of “values” – “Asian” or “Western” or any other – nor one of vectors of “influence” between an essentialized “West” and an equally essentialized “East”. Instead, we witness the chain of interactions behind Japan's adoption of the postal savings bank institution following the British example; the Japanese innovation of the institution in mobilizing the population for the campaign of wartime savings; and British emulation of that campaign. Discussing these developments, Garon manages to link them to the interplay between supposedly “Japanese” Bushidō and the formation of the Boy Scouts. By the last page of Garon's chapter, any Lee Kuan Yew-style assertion of “Asian values” of selfless commitment to the collectivity, manifested in the higher rates of household savings, must sound ridiculous even to an undergraduate.

If historians of East Asia have a meaningful contribution to make to the shaping of global history, it is probably in this mode: the piling of thoroughly researched and well-documented cases that intuitively show how wrong-headed the historiography artificially constrained to the bounds of a national space is. Indeed, the very story of formation of “nations” and their “states” – in East Asia and elsewhere – must be told in the same mode that Garon or Baba invite us to adopt: one of tracing circular patterns of improvised emulation, adaptation and co-production of imaginaries, ideas and institutions.

Once we suspect that these links exist, nothing excuses us as historians from the duty to explore them, record them and take them into account in articulating new textbook syntheses. This is what all historians should be doing as a matter of course, not something that we file away in a separate specialized drawer tagged “global history” which we only open on those occasions when we are not rummaging through drawers misleadingly tagged “local”, “national” or “regional”. That they require of us more philological virtuosity is blatantly obvious, but if that is where our material points, there we must follow. And if we do not individually possess linguistic skills sufficient for the enterprise, we need to learn to collaborate in our research with colleagues who do.

The “global” dimension of historiography in this sense cannot be relegated to one particular scale of analysis, falsely juxtaposing the “global” with the “local”, “national”, or “regional”. Instead, it needs to become a standard tool of every historian's kit, a normal operational mode of all historiography, not because we wish to present a more cosmopolitan vision of the past and convince people to feel “Global Citizens” or “Earthers” rather than “Nationals”, but because the critical examination of the past evidence requires it.