World history has only recently become popular in France. This is probably partly because the Annales school, and before that the methodical school, had established themselves in reaction against German-style ‘universal history’ and its quasi-philosophical pretensions – a trend more recently consolidated by the popularity of microstoria. On the other hand, the reason may more simply be because many French historians do not read English, at least not fluently, and because the founding works of world history have not been translated, or not until recently. Yet, in recent years, publications and special issues of journals have multiplied in France. However, this does not mean that important new authors or ground-breaking books have emerged. It is significant that two of the works reviewed here are collective, and that a geographer is the author of the third.

The seminal article by the French-Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian (‘World history: histoire mondiale, histoire universelle’) in the multidisciplinary review Le débat draws attention to the French origins of world history as a disciplinary field – something hardly noticed in English-language historiography. This was especially apparent in the early 1950s, when an International Commission was set up by UNESCO for writing a history of the world that would avoid Eurocentrism, which also led to the launching in 1953 of the trilingual (French–British–Spanish) Cahiers d'histoire mondiale/Journal of World History. Lucien Febvre (co-founder of the Annales) and the young historian Charles Morazé occupied a central place. In what followed, and in spite of the relative failure of the project, several major French-speaking works marked out the next three decades: those of Pierre Chaunu, Maurice Lombard and his son Denys Lombard, Ruggiero Romano, Louis Dermigny, Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, Michel Mollat, and of course the ‘Pope of historians’, Fernand Braudel. These works were mostly monographs, often focused on Latin America, favoured the so-called modern era (the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), and used a now outdated economic approach, involving trade, ship movements, prices, wages, and so forth. Furthermore, the ‘archives trap’ led to an almost exclusive emphasis on relations between Europe and the ‘Rest’. Such an emphasis was already significant in the work of American historians, particularly those of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

After defining the characteristics of each of the three generations that established world history in the United States, Pomian ends his article with a few pointed questions, so far unresolved. How can we reconcile a determinedly diverse history, deprived of any centre or model of evolution, without any hierarchy between modes of production or civilizations, or even (especially in the case of Immanuel Wallerstein) without civilization as a significant factor, and the axiom of the unity of humankind (beyond some biological features)? Is history doomed to wane into historical sociology or anthropology? The laudable desire – in principle – to put into perspective the weight, specificity, and successes of the West often ends in a systematic belittlement of the Western world, which ironically comes mainly from American campuses and expresses itself only in English, while neglecting almost everything that has not been published in that language. For Pomian, the triumph of world history could indeed, paradoxically, bring a fragmentation of the history of peoples and cultures, with nothing any longer transcending communal belongings.

Other articles in the same issue are also of great interest. We shall pass over those featuring the works of Marshall G. S. Hodgson, William H. McNeill, and Wallerstein, some of which are translated from the Journal of World History. But François Hartog (‘De l'histoire universelle à l'histoire globale? Expériences du temps’), while exposing brilliantly his ‘historicity regime’ theory, is consistent with Pomian's concern about some of the major trends of recent historiography (postmodernism, subalternism, etc.): ‘ultimately, there would be no history any more, only uses of the past …: to each his memory … some not only promote alternative stories …, but outright alternatives to history’ (p. 65). Giving in to the pressure of our contemporaries, historical production tends to abide by what he calls presentism. The anthropologist Alain Testart (‘L'histoire globale peut-elle ignorer les Nambikwara? Plaidoyer pour l'ethnohistoire’) shows that history and ethnology have usually ignored each other. The regime of truth is indeed very different from one discipline to the other: raw materials (‘primary sources’) are used in history, observation reports (‘secondary sources’) in ethnology, the most recent one tending to annul all previous ones, which naturally leads to relativism. Source criticism remains the privilege of historians. However, historians do have an increasing need of ethnologists, especially in understanding stateless societies (past and present), that is to say, the societies that are most often without either writing or archives.

The political scientist Jean-François Bayart (‘En finir avec les études postcoloniales’) tries to explain why that current of history, so inspired by ‘French theory’, has developed belatedly in France, and has encountered much reluctance to participate, even among historians critical of colonization. True, many French-speaking authors are the source of postcolonial discourse (Franz Fanon and his preface writer Jean-Paul Sartre, Aimé Césaire, and Albert Memmi); moreover, the postcolonial authors do refer frequently to them. But that dated thought, closely related to the period of struggle for decolonization, is based on discourse analysis far more than on the careful study of concrete situations, using archival documents. Thus, it has long been criticized by French historians as abusively simplifying colonial situations that were far more complex than simple relations of domination. The idea of an autonomous history of colonized peoples should be highlighted, and the ‘colonial moment’ should be considered as much a product of those people's history as that of colonization, the colonial relationship being moreover far richer and more productive than a mere oppression–resistance coupling. In brief, according to Bayart, the ‘postcolonialists’ as a school of thought do not add anything valuable to the history of their societies, and, fascinated by ‘the catastrophic concept of “identity”’ (p. 127), should rather be called ‘postnationalists’. He calls for a désessentialisation, a re-historicization of colonial relationships, and a recognition of their global dimension, while the dominant historiography, postcolonial authors included, treats them as if they were ‘a series of national monads’ (p. 137).

Christian Grataloup, the main French representative of ‘géohistoire’, for which he has succeeded in building a rigorous methodology, offers in Géohistoire de la mondialisation an ambitious synthesis, ranging from prehistory to the twenty-first century. He demonstrates that he is as well informed about Africa or Polynesia as he is about Europe. Overall, the ability to accumulate (ideas as well as material goods) and the intensity of interactions between societies, a phenomenon favoured by high population densities and by urbanization (the town being the main place of diversity), produce the differences in economic and social success. Isolation is the enemy, according to Grataloup. The central idea of the book is probably the distinction between globality (mondialité; always specific, based on a de facto hegemony, and thus polarized) and universality (universalité; the never-reached ideal of a world truly belonging to everyone). Therein lies the source of tensions and conflicts, which we have by no means succeeded in eradicating.

The first part (‘The worlds before the world’) examines the evolution, then often widely differing, of the main clusters of population before the sixteenth century. The second part (‘The construction of the world’) explains the novelty of a wider world overlapping the previously disparate worlds, but without absorbing them completely did emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter 6 (‘Temperate Europe produces underdevelopment in the tropics’) is probably the most controversial one. Indeed, Grataloup deals boldly with the irritating finding of a strong coincidence, for many centuries, between wealth and the temperate zone, poverty and the tropical zone. But he is careful not to give in to the determinism of ‘natural conditions’, and sees in that coincidence the effect of a complementarity (itself acquired only from the late Middle Ages) between tropical agriculture and European markets, with their strong demand for spices, then for sugar, and then for stimulating beverages. Geographic proximity (to the West Indies, the Brazilian Nordeste, and West Africa) then played its part to the full.

The third part (‘The limits of the world’) is devoted to the changes introduced by the twentieth century. In an original way, Grataloup focuses particularly on the resistance and countertrends to globalization, which make him conclude that this is ‘a reversible process. The world is not inevitable, neither in form nor in its very existence’ (p. 203). The strongest countertrends are probably not to be found on the side of the anti-global movements, but in the reluctance of many nations (rich and poor) to liberalize their agricultural markets, and in the aspiration of the Muslim world (benefiting from its central location in the ancient world) to build a strong counterculture and to give preference to a restricted field of solidarity. In short, ‘we are in a world that is increasingly multi-scale’ (p. 243), which is neither easy to imagine or to come to terms with. We should at least try to ‘decolonize’ the sphere of knowledge, either by challenging the borders and objects of various social sciences – still highly marked by their Western origin – or by questioning the conventional naming of continents and of the main chronological divisions, still absurdly keyed to those of Europe. This does not mean neglecting the contributions coming from the West, and even less does it mean yielding to the temptations of radical relativism, at the same time destroying the very idea of universal (e.g. moral) standards and condemning the individuals to a communal belonging, whether they like it or not, and even to submission to despotic regimes thus legitimized.

Histoire globale, edited by Lawrence Testot and emanating from the popular magazine Sciences Humaines, bears the mark of the good quality and transdisciplinary openness that characterize that periodical. Education-oriented, it includes an annotated bibliography, introductory definitions, a (short) glossary, various chronologies, and many informative boxes. The twenty-one articles and interviews are drawn from the cream of French authors (not all of them historians) on the subject; only two are English-speaking, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Roy Bin Wong. Chapters may be criticized to some extent for a brevity (less than ten pages on average) more useful for readability than for depth. The book fulfils its purpose, however, by demonstrating the richness and diversity of the global approach to history: theoretical aspects (‘The world society, a short story’, by Jacques Lévy; ‘The global dimension in economic history’, by Philippe Norel), methodological facets (‘For a change in historiographical scale’, by Caroline Douki and Philippe Minard; ‘Big history and environmental history’, by René-Eric Dagorn), and syntheses on an event (‘1492: a crucial year’, by Bernard Vincent), a space (‘A globalized space: the Indian Ocean’, by Philippe Beaujard), or a theme (‘Milestones for a global history of slavery’, by Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau; ‘Colonial empires: an attempt at overall assessment’, by Bouda Etemad).

Many articles provide information useful for a wide readership, but some stand out for originality or depth. Thus Jerôme Baschet (‘The medieval roots of Western expansion’) assigns to the Church, with its unique ability to combine localism and universalism, the mainspring of the conquest and reorganization of the New World. It is the ‘feudal–ecclesiastical system’ (p. 37) that extends to America, and not merchant capitalism. Jacques Lévy highlights some key moments in the formation of the political world society. The problem is that international law remains ‘interstitial’ (p. 81) in the dominant interstate logic, and that ‘A “political” territory is requested for a world first formed by the coalescence of its multiple “networks”’ (p. 85). Philippe Beaujard shows that the main consequence of European discoveries has been to move westwards the centre of gravity of a world system previously built around the Indian Ocean. Douki and Minard assert their preference for a ‘connected history’ by no means incompatible with microstoria, despite common sense. Philippe Norel sums up the three main trends in global economic history: the slightly old-fashioned convergence trend, the world-system school, and the neo-Smithian, or eclectic, trend – doubtless the most fashionable today. What triumphs, in any case, is a shift both in time (an interest in globalization in the longue durée) and in space (the new weight given to Asia).

In conclusion, here are three publications teeming with intellectual robustness, which should be food for thought beyond the French-speaking world.