To be asked to write a piece on the state of our field, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Journal of Global History—to revisit the field’s past, say something about where it stands, and might be headed—is both an honour and a daunting task. How to do so without being partisan or trivial, triumphalist or naïve, catastrophist or teleological, is difficult, to say the least. To this author, the most productive way through this difficulty seemed to be through drawing on her secondary expertise as a historian of science and knowledge, principally in its historical epistemology variant, and to examine global history from a critical distance, with the self-reflexivity that this affords. What follows are thoughts on the trajectory and contours of global history; the field’s sense of purpose, its presentism, and politics; its current sense of crisis, set against its remarkable and lasting vibrancy, influence, and weight; its difficulties and limitations; and finally, the field’s strengths, the truths it has brought to history, and its lasting contribution.

There is no need to detain ourselves long with a linear account of the disciplinary development of global history—its ‘chronological landmarks’: from Bruce Mazlish’s 1993 pioneering collection of articles, to the 1996 founding of the Journal of World History, the publication of The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz in 2000, to Christopher Bayly’s 2004 The Birth of the Modern World, the creation of the Journal of Global History in 2006, and so on to the present day in 2026.Footnote ¹ This thirty-year history is by now well established. It is nevertheless worth reminding ourselves of that chronology. When the Journal of Global History was founded twenty years ago in 2006, global history was, if no longer entirely new, still, in some sense, unsettled. As Patrick O’Brien put it in his introduction to the journal’s first issue, its practitioners still felt they were working at ‘an intellectual frontier’. There were still controversies at the time over what to ‘call such history’, as one colleague put it in the American Historical Review (AHR) conversation, ‘On Transnational History’, which came out that same year; whether it was best designated ‘global’, ‘world’, or ‘transnational’ history and what differentiated these. Also present were concerns over global history’s ‘seriousness’ and its durability—would it be nothing but a fleeting ‘fashion of the moment’? Historians worried that they might be unable to ‘retain [their] audience’ if they moved away from national histories. There were also grievances over the scarcity and dearth of ‘empirical research’. At that point, as one of the AHR discussants put it, ‘more printed pages [had] been dedicated to the need for’ such history than to its practice. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World was ‘still an exception’, not the rule.Footnote ² Indeed, in 2006, while global history was no longer a mere promise as it had been into the 1990s, it had also not yet become the library that it is today,Footnote ³ comprising a vast range of research monographs;Footnote ⁴ reference books on ‘what is’ global history and how to ‘do’ or ‘navigate’ it;Footnote ⁵ and weighty, multivolume histories of the world, such as those edited by Akira Iriye, Jürgen Osterhammel, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks.Footnote ⁶

Today, twenty years after 2006, global history is an established—indeed, in many ways a solid and settled—field of history, with all the features that historians of science would expect of an academic (sub)discipline worthy of the name. It has a recognized community of scholars, committed to a shared subject matter and a body of specialist knowledge. It shares methods—or perhaps better, methodological challenges—and standards of acceptable evidence.Footnote ⁷ It has its own jargon and conceptual repertoire. ‘Connectivity’, ‘the local’, ‘globality’, ‘flow’, and ‘circulation’—the perennial favourites—are at once concepts and metaphors, and they have coalesced into epistemic objects, domains of inquiry.Footnote ⁸ Like any scientific community, the field also—if somewhat reluctantly—shares a lingua franca, English, one that allows speakers of different native languages to communicate with one another.Footnote ⁹ Global history has also developed its own institutional forums. Across the world, ‘historia global’, ‘quanqiu shiguan’ (全球史观), or ‘Globalgeschichte’ have gained a foothold, albeit to varying degrees: in the form of associations, university departments, and, not least, journals—another indispensable feature of any modern academic field.Footnote ¹⁰ Like any discipline since the nineteenth century, global history now also boasts a venerable genealogy—or, as critics might say, an ‘invented tradition’—that lends both cohesion and legitimacy to ‘an ostensibly, but far from modern, field of history’, as Patrick O’Brien put it in the journal’s 2006 prolegomenon.Footnote ¹¹ The field cites a lineage of ecumenical, relational, and non-parochial historiography, with its ‘godfathers’ stretching back to Herodotus, Ibn Khaldun, and Voltaire.Footnote ¹² Over the past two decades, global history has also seen its (albeit comparatively diffident) share of feuds, rivalries, and dissent—another crucial accomplishment any self-respecting scientific or humanistic discipline would want to lay claim to.Footnote ¹³ Not least, there are both sophisticated internal taxonomies and tendencies of dissipation, fragmentation, and withdrawal. Several approaches with ‘family resemblances’ immediately recognizable to outsiders—a relational impetus and a purview beyond the nation-state from ‘trans-imperial’ or ‘entangled’ to world or ‘connected’ histories—assert their distinctiveness or declare their autonomy.Footnote ¹⁴ All of these are sure signs that ‘global history’ has become visible as a bounded entity—something one might define oneself against, or even cast as a bogeyman. To the historian of science, the defining features of the established, settled academic field are all there.

Whether or not we situate global history within a longer tradition, few would dispute that the field assumed its current contours, sense of purpose, and momentum in the Anglophone, post-Cold War world of the 1990s and early 2000s, a period that witnessed the ascendancy of both the reality and—not least in the social sciences—the idea and concept of ‘globalization’.Footnote ¹⁵ The first generation of global historians tied the field to that ‘leitmotif’, as Patrick O’Brien put it in his 2006 article, and with it, to politics and values: to the ‘cosmopolitan enterprise’, the educational and historiographical ‘needs of a globalizing world’.Footnote ¹⁶ Especially in its popular variant, the educational impetus persists; vide Patrick Boucheron’s 2017 Histoire Mondiale de la France, for instance, a political book about conveying a pluralistic, diverse narrative of French history,Footnote ¹⁷ and its Latin American, Italian, or German counterparts.Footnote ¹⁸ Much of the field’s understanding of history remains infused with that presentism—global history’s ability to account for the globalized world of today—and with it, with a sense of direction, the telos of global integration.Footnote ¹⁹ Global historians like to regard themselves as the ‘vanguard of anti-teleology’—anti Eurocentrism and nationalism, as Jan C. Jansen put it.Footnote ²⁰ But even if not all global historians study global integration, a certain sense of direction is implicit in the field’s very research interests: in the spread of ideas, the crafting of connections, or the formation of networks.Footnote ²¹ A sense of direction is not uncommon in history writing, to be sure. Histories of democracy were, for a long time, sagas of advances and reverses in the realization of an ideal.Footnote ²² Environmental histories had their own ‘negative teleology’ of environmental destruction.Footnote ²³ In fact, its politics, educational impetus, and relation to contemporary globalization were part of global history’s attraction. Unlike cultural histories, which were always better at ‘tearing down’ than (re)building, as Lynn Hunt phrased it, global history had a succinct purpose and message, a better answer in response to the ‘what is it good for’ question.Footnote ²⁴ As any student of historiography will tell you, presentism has long been a controversial issue among historians. Wherever one stands on it, however, there is no denying the epistemological perils of presentism, politics, and teleology. The danger is not necessarily to our research integrity, as historians have long argued.Footnote ²⁵ Rather, it is to the historian’s understanding of complexity and contingency,Footnote ²⁶ to their sense of proportion, as critics were quite right to emphasize.Footnote ²⁷ Not least, a sense of direction poses a danger to any field’s ability to surprise.Footnote ²⁸ It risks becoming predictable: the reader will know in advance that the plant will ‘circulate’, the traveller will reach foreign lands, or the forest will disappear.

What has troubled global historians the most, however, is another consequence of the field’s presentism. Like other areas of the humanities that tied their fate to a cause and to values—post-colonial studies, queer history, environmental history—there was and is considerable anxiety that the field might come under pressure as those values change, especially in the countries that championed them. Concretely, there was great concern, starting about ten years ago, when nationalism and disintegration became palpable with Brexit and Donald J. Trump’s first term in the United States, that global history might have ‘had its moment’, as Jeremy Adelman put it in his 2017 Aeon piece: the expectation of a ‘backlash against post-national, cosmopolitan story-telling’ that might suddenly seem ‘out of step with [the] times’.Footnote ²⁹ Adelman’s article immediately drew criticism from colleagues who vigorously defended the field against what they read as an ‘attack’ from within—for Adelman had suggested that global history’s cosmopolitan bias, scale of analysis, and Western elite personnel had partly contributed to the field’s predicament.Footnote ³⁰ A clarification from the author followed immediately—his intent had been renewal, not ‘to pack it in’—but the sense that global history was somehow in crisis—or worse, ‘dead’ already—acquired a curious momentum of its own. A palpable unease took hold, and the field suddenly appeared to be ‘under attack’, both from without and within.Footnote ³¹

This shift towards a discourse of crisis came as something of a surprise because it followed a markedly different temporal dispositive: a rhetoric of novelty, youthfulness, and emergence. Throughout the early 2000s, global historians had shared Patrick O’Brien’s sense of working on ‘an intellectual frontier’; for years, global history was described as a ‘young field’ or one ‘in its adolescence’.Footnote ³² That language morphed seamlessly into the field’s ‘the-hegemony-of-national historiography-is-over’ momentum of the early 2010s, a phase of triumphalism, perhaps overreach. To be sure, David Armitage’s original formulation was more aspirational than triumphalist, much like Christopher Bayly’s 2004 pronouncement that ‘all historians [were] world historians now’.Footnote ³³ Armitage’s point in 2012 was that, though not everyone practised global history, those who did not now ‘had to explain why’ when, a decade earlier, the burden of justification had fallen in the opposite direction. By the early 2010s, ‘the national historians [were] on the defensive’.Footnote ³⁴ At any rate, well into the 2010s, global history appeared to be on a steady upward trajectory—expanding, aspiring, confident about its future—giving little indication of the somewhat abrupt turn towards a sense of uncertainty and crisis that would follow after 2016.

Whether the expected backlash and crisis of the field have in fact occurred—or will yet occur—is harder to determine than we might think. Global history undoubtedly is, and will further be, severely affected, by a culture of anti-intellectualism, warfare, economic deglobalization, ‘epistemic rot’, and fiscal austerity, not least in the very direct form of budget cuts at universities in countries that pioneered global history, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.Footnote ³⁵ What is less clear, however, is whether global history has been affected disproportionately—more so than other historical fields, or indeed other areas of the humanities and sciences.

If anyone understands the drawbacks of centrism and vantage point, it is the global historian.Footnote ³⁶ Nevertheless, there are good reasons to adopt a centred perspective to respond to the question of whether global history has suffered more than other fields—for our present purpose, a perspective centred on the Journal of Global History. That is because, as the field’s leading journal, it offers a reasonably reliable indicator of publishing trends—and, by extension, of the state of the field more broadly. From this perspective, at least, there is little evidence to suggest decline, let alone crisis. On the contrary: in terms of the number of submissions, for instance, there was no rupture after 2016; quite the opposite. According to editorial statistics, article submissions increased by approximately 123 per cent between 2016 and 2025.Footnote ³⁷ As befits the field, submissions come from all over the world. While the journal’s authorship (and acceptance rate) remains weighted toward the Anglosphere, it is broader than that of many comparable history journals, with contributors based at universities in Temuco, Ghent, Cairo, Oslo, Seville, Macau, and Delhi.Footnote ³⁸ Submissions to journals have, of course, increased more generally, but the Journal of Global History has also thrived in comparison with its peers. Importantly, in recent years, it has established itself among the foremost history journals. In 2020, the Journal of Global History ranked first among all history journals by Impact Factor, and it has consistently remained in the top six since then. It is also ranked just above the top 3 per cent of history journals worldwide by Scimago. Judging by these metrics, the Journal of Global History is not only able to compete with many general-interest, English-language history journals—such as Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the American Historical Review—but in many cases outperforms them. At present, it has a slightly higher five-year impact factor than the American Historical Review, widely regarded as ‘the journal of record for the historical profession’ in the United States and beyond.Footnote ³⁹ Within the logic of these metrics at least, the Journal of Global History is way ahead of comparable subfield journals like Environmental History, the world’s leading journal in that field, or Isis, the most prestigious journal in the history of science, medicine, and technology.Footnote ⁴⁰ The popular appeal of the field in society also seems unbroken; take best-selling books like Boucheron’s, or Sven Beckert’s recent global history of capitalism, which top feuilletons and Amazon sales lists.Footnote ⁴¹

What is more, global history is by now both a field and a sensibility. It offers a certain ‘perspective’ and specific form of attention to relations and acts of recourse that many, though certainly not all, historians across the world are expected to acquire in their training.Footnote ⁴² It has inscribed itself within—infiltrated, if you like, or enlightened—other modes of historical research, to the point where many articles that are published in the Journal of Global History might just as well be published in American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, or Past & Present, and vice versa.Footnote ⁴³ That infiltration cuts both ways. Writing this piece has given this author a welcome excuse to spend an agreeable few days perusing articles across the more than sixty issues of the Journal of Global History that have come out since March 2006. Many of the charges initially laid at the field’s door—elitism; the eschewal of stasis, violence, or culture; even the charge of ‘connectivism’ and a fixation on ‘concord’—no longer hold, partly because its practitioners have absorbed, and continue to absorb, the virtues of other historical subfields or approaches.Footnote ⁴⁴ The last few issues of the Journal of Global History included pieces on pastoralists’ markets in Central Asia; unconvertible currencies, like the Ruble; post-war ideas about ‘madness’ and the universality of the psyche; overpopulation and family planning; and war crimes in the 1950–53 Korean War.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even where the pieces’ emphasis rests on global connections themselves, as in Ismay Milford’s article on the distant listeners of Ugandan radio broadcasting in the 1970s (at a time when ‘hunting’ for radio signals on a sensitive shortwave receiving set was a global pastime), it is infused with, and contributes to, histories of technology, the everyday, and the workplace.Footnote ⁴⁶ The field is vibrant in so many ways, and much of its even greater liveliness after 2016 stems from the porousness of its boundaries, its capacity for adaptation and renewal.

This flourishing makes the discourse of crisis and controversy in global history even more curious. ‘Crisis’ has always encompassed both the objective—a palpable event or process—and the subjective judgement and perception of it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Originally a medical term denoting the critical turning point in an acute disease—often a ‘fever’—at which the patient would either recover or die, the term ‘crisis’ has, since the 1780s, as the historian of ideas would tell you, become an increasingly ubiquitous and vague rhetorical gesture: one inherent in modernity and its understanding of temporality, progress and decline, and the pliability of the future. Like risk, endangerment, or, indeed, newness or momentum, it is a means to dramatize and to rally: a call for constant renewal.Footnote ⁴⁸ The invocation of ‘crisis’, just as, incidentally, that of being ‘under attack’, has several consequences, not least that it transforms whatever is said to be in crisis—in our case, global history—into a cause. Here again, the field of global history is far from unique. The humanities, in an alleged ‘perpetual decline and crisis’, have very much become themselves a cause, as one critic recently put it: ‘a thing to be saved’, to be defended, ‘like the whales or the manatees’.Footnote ⁴⁹ For global history, however, this framing is both unwarranted and potentially dangerous because it is self-reinforcing. If the field is repeatedly described as being in crisis, it may soon find itself in one. More importantly, it obscures not only the fact that global history is, in many respects, a thriving field, but also that its coming-of-age story is in fact a familiar one—classic and conventional rather than exceptional for a historical field, or indeed for any academic discipline.

In many ways, even our presentism has been not only conventional—all histories relate to the present—but also productive. Somewhat counterintuitively, it has been productive of truth. As any historical epistemologist, or historian of historiography, will be glad to inform you, the historian’s truth has always been a humble one. There is no metaphysical historical truth independent of place or writer, and all our representations of the past are provisional and epistemologically imperfect. Historians attain only phenomena, ‘things as they are perceived by us’, ‘shadows on the wall’. We always operate within the paradox that ‘the only thing we can say about past events with certainty is that they did not unfold exactly as we represent them’. We will never know how it ‘really was’ (eigentlich gewesen); history, in the necessary absence of the past, is the effect of a description that is never complete.Footnote ⁵⁰ Presentism would seem to exacerbate that necessary imperfection, but, as scholars have argued for some time, the binary between normativity, ideology, and civic and political engagement, on the one hand, and detached analysis, objectivity, professionalism, and scrupulous research, on the other hand, is a false dichotomy.Footnote ⁵¹ It is a false dichotomy not only because, despite the necessary humility, the historian’s principal obligation always is ‘to pursue the truth’, to write ‘with integrity’, as Marc Bloch put it.Footnote ⁵² The politics-versus-truth formulation is a false dichotomy also because, at its best, the dialogue—and even more so the friction—between the present and the past is a productive one ‘that sets off debates … between the historian and her sources’, as Sarah Maza phrased it.Footnote ⁵³ It raises new questions, improves, and thickens our ever-incomplete description. The present can draw our attention to some of the many ‘possibilities that lie dormant within the historical’: pieces of which we, only a few years ago, did not suspect might one day be a part of our history.Footnote ⁵⁴ History is a ‘selection of facts’, to use Edward H. Carr’s classic formulation, ‘out of all the myriad facts that must once have been known to somebody’, and our questions, possibilities, and circumstance—in short, our present— will add to these.Footnote ⁵⁵ Presentism, then, is not merely an unavoidable condition of history but one of its principal resources to disclose aspects of the past that would otherwise remain unseen.

Importantly, the inception of the new global history in the 1990s and early 2000s was neither the first nor likely the last time for our craft to gravitate to and renew itself through subjects reflecting current concerns—think of race, the nation-state, the environment, or women and gender.Footnote ⁵⁶ Very often, these approaches begin with a certain triumphalism and overconfidence. As the discussants put it in the 2006 AHR conversation, ‘On Transnational History’, they remembered the experience of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when first area studies, then family history and local history ‘succeeded each other as the new holy grail’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Similarly, in the early 2000s, the cultural historian Ute Daniel lamented the recurrent, familiar cycle of ‘pretensions of unprecedented novelty’ that often came with methodological innovations in history; the rituals of boundary drawing, intellectual self-fashioning, and preoccupation with disciplinary rank that often had more to do ‘with the will to be right than with the will to know’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In time, any field’s holy grail momentum would pass, often as the present-day concerns that had given rise to them—such as the Cold War, which had supported area studies—were removed, changed, or lost their immediate relevance. And yet most of these once-holy-grails persist, both as institutionalized fields—with their own institutes, conferences, and journals—and as sensibilities, ‘perspectives’, and forms of attention to inform and deepen the wider field of history.

The lasting achievement of these successive historiographical turns of the last decades is not the replacement of one orthodoxy by another, but the gradual enlargement of the historian’s horizon—an expanded repertoire of questions and objects of inquiry. Many years ago in 1979, in the framework of a very different controversy over history and long before the new global history was even discussed, the German historian and intellectual Golo Mann wrote about what was, to him, the most important progress that had been achieved over the last years in the field of history: the proliferation of questions one could ask, the increase in the number of possible subjects to which a historian could attend.Footnote ⁵⁹ All of a sudden, by the late 1970s, there were peasants, a working class, women; the world of the past seemed to have grown richer, more interesting, more complex. That is what the ecumenical, relational, and non-parochial historiography of the last few decades—which this author refers to as global history, but the name does not signify—can lay claim to, too. It is a claim that is both modest and colossal: that of having added, of continuing to add, to the questions, the subjects, the variety of ‘angles of vision’ that add up to and constitute history, our humble truth.

Global history is no smooth sailing; it has never been. For one thing, the practice of global history is difficult.Footnote ⁶⁰ We cannot treat our parameters as though they were a given; the very choice of locality, suitable unit of analysis, periodization, or any category of analysis requires reflection, because none of them are sanctioned by tacit—that is, national—conventions, as several recent works have stressed.Footnote ⁶¹ Many of the historian’s basic cognitive instruments—the use of a meta-language, comparison, explanation—rely on abstraction and the reduction of complexity and are therefore more difficult for the global historian, who handles an unusual plurality of variables and social and cultural configurations, an overabundance of material, a profusion of disparate evidence, and many different regularities.Footnote ⁶² It is difficult also because having a lingua franca does not, as has sometimes been suggested, necessarily correspond to ‘flatness’, or an inability to read sources in foreign languages.Footnote ⁶³ Rather, global history requires language proficiency. To return to the case at hand: between the first issue of 2015 and the second of 2020, for instance, authors in the Journal of Global History quoted sources and literature in French, Norwegian, Latin, Portuguese, German, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, Indonesian, Tamil, Welsh, Japanese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Bengali, and Swahili, among other languages. This is not to suggest that there is no room for improvement. Nevertheless, many historians working in the field are proficient in several languages, and such linguistic range is increasingly considered integral to the good practice of global history. Global history is hardly smooth sailing also because it is structurally constrained from realizing its own aspirations for a ‘fair(er) global history’.Footnote ⁶⁴ It operates in a deeply hierarchical, uneven global academic system—a world of linguistic hierarchies, unequal freedom from political pressure, disparities in access to published research, funding, or the passports that allow for archival travel.Footnote ⁶⁵ Those critiquing or seeking to redress those imbalances within the field—including past and present editors of the Journal of Global History—pursue a deeply worthy, essential project, but one that is bound to remain an uphill struggle.Footnote ⁶⁶

Another reason why global history is no smooth sailing, to continue with that metaphor, is that some of the field’s traits go against the grain of our ‘epistemic virtues’: the norms and imperatives instilled, praised, and rehearsed among historians as the proper way of knowing.Footnote ⁶⁷ While global history is no longer as closely associated with structuralism, meta-narratives, and the macro scale, global histories, by definition, even in their micro-variant, relate the particular to the general and to wider, global processes, or seek to abstract and ‘aggregate to macro-level’.Footnote ⁶⁸ That can alienate some. Post-modernism and the cultural turn have instilled in historians an aversion to grand narratives and ‘all-embracing formulas’—in some measure even to generalization more broadly.Footnote ⁶⁹ What is more, many historians tend to associate the histories of the ‘lower level’, the confined scene, the material object—indeed, ‘the local’—with superior epistemic qualities. They associate it with truthfulness, rigour, and ‘reality’; with the promise of stability, epistemological safety, and immediacy.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some early proponents of global history clairvoyantly—or perhaps already from experience—anticipated that colleagues would dismiss global history on the grounds that the only way to do ‘real history’ was ‘at the level of the local and the family, the history of “experience”’.Footnote ⁷¹ Even earlier, in the 1990s French debates on jeux d’échelles—the playful oscillation between scales or levels of analysis—authors criticized the idea of one scale’s ‘epistemological superiority’ (supériorité épistémologique) over the other: how historians associated the micro-scale with the concrete, the particular, and the empirical, and how that was misguided. The level of the individual was more granular, they argued, but not more empirical or more real than the level of societal interactions.Footnote ⁷² The association persists, however, and is implicit in much scepticism and reticence about global history.

Global history goes against the epistemological grain in other ways, too. The synthesis-variant of global history, evidently, but also other modes, like the pursuit of an object of study ‘across time, space, and specialism’, will often take global historians to places, or subject areas, of which they do not have a deep, serious, or expert understanding.Footnote ⁷³ This is even the case for the global microhistorian ‘following’ their subject—be it a peripatetic bishop, costume book, or sea otter.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, that was one of the field’s core ideas: to overcome not just geographical confines, but also the ‘thematic fragmentation’ of the historiography and the ‘segmentation of scholarly expertise into discrete specialisms’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Moving beyond one’s specialism is, of course, the textbook definition of dilettantism—an epistemic sin some historians have admitted they fear to commit when straying beyond their region of study.Footnote ⁷⁶ Again, historical epistemology can help us make sense of that anxiety. Ever since modern academic disciplines first emerged in the late nineteenth century, when a divided map of knowledge won out over a paradigm of ‘common erudition’, the deprecation of dilettantism became the norm. It was no longer thought possible that a scholar could work responsibly in two widely separated locations. The victory of disciplinary specialists entailed a new ideal of how research should be carried on: in a single area of knowledge.Footnote ⁷⁷ Global history, in contrast, requires us to go against the grain of epistemic virtues that have been instilled in us, what we are taught is our forte: ‘in-depth knowledge of the context in which a particular historical phenomenon is situated’.Footnote ⁷⁸

And yet, though it may be immensely difficult and against the grain, there is no way ‘back from the global turn’, as David Motadel and Richard Drayton put it in this journal in 2018, ‘any more than we could go back to a history which paid no attention to women or the poor’.Footnote ⁷⁹ There is no way back because our obligation is to write history ‘with integrity, with truth, with the utmost penetration … and, hence, with difficulty’.Footnote ⁸⁰ And for many periods and places, the truth cannot be apprehended through a narrow or parochial history. For these, anything short of a relational, ecumenical, global, or world history is but ‘a makeshift solution’.Footnote ⁸¹ Following an epistemic object ‘across … space, and specialism’ will take us to places or subject areas of which we do not have expert understanding: to be dilettantes. But not to follow them, to halt our narrative at some border, would be untruthful. It would be but a fraction that improperly pretends to be whole. Our truth is that some persons, ideas, and forms of matter in the past did not stay put—think of migrants and nomads; of fashions and democracy (or fascism, for that matter); of phosphates or microplastics.Footnote ⁸² Our truth is that some phenomena occur, manifest, or operate globally: financial crises (since 1873 at the very least); climate anomalies (from earlier ‘natural’ anomalies like the Little Ice Age, the Great El Niño, or the Tambora eruption to the anthropogenic climate change of the late modern era); and political processes such as nation-state formation, or, indeed, warfare and aggression—‘the most direct form of connection imaginable’.Footnote ⁸³ Global history, understood as a form of geographical freedom and openness of attention, has also added to the quality of historians’ explanations; it has made them more truthful and complete. David A. Bell quite rightly warned against overstating the weight of external influences over internal causes in our explanations, but to leave external influences out altogether (which was never his claim, to be clear) would lead to less complete, merely partial explanations.Footnote ⁸⁴ The best possible answer to the why question—in the case of Bell’s critique, the French Revolution—will encompass a variety of factors, carefully weighted, from French involvement in the American War of Independence to the harsh winter of 1789 and the abolition of feudal privileges.Footnote ⁸⁵ So much of what historians see in the past—especially, but by no means exclusively, the modern past—is neither explicable nor understandable without taking into consideration the wider world: ‘nature’ itself (take forests, their composition, or loss), the very ‘countryside’ in which our historical subjects moved, can only be accounted for by virtue of their societies’ relations, trade, or wars with other, distant ones.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ditto, the very fabrics they wore on their bodies, or the landscape of contagious disease in which they suffered and died.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ditto, from the 1800s, the price of the bread on their tables or their social insurance, which would have followed either the German capitalist or the Soviet socialist model.Footnote ⁸⁸ Also, it is only the readiness to look as widely as the world—adopt a global perspective—that allows us to gauge the true geographical extent and scope of any phenomenon, the (ir)relevance of it for societies around the world, as well as its boundaries. A global perspective can also save us from drawing the wrong conclusions. In pushing authors to attend to similarities, relations, or influences from elsewhere, it prevents them from misjudging features they might otherwise erroneously think of as idiosyncratic, singular, vernacular, or homegrown. For example, Zen Buddhism, as Sarah Panzer has shown in this journal, had quite some reception among Nazi ideologues, whose interpretation transitioned into the post-war New Age movement.Footnote ⁸⁹ Like cultural histories before, which shocked readers into understanding that the categories they took for granted—the body, pain, manliness—were not natural, global histories have taken all the ‘naturalness’ out of the vernacular, the national, or the universal.Footnote ⁹⁰ Global history has also added range and fullness to the jigsaw that is history because it insists that its practitioners move—albeit with different emphases—between close-range observation and the bird’s-eye view and vantage point.Footnote ⁹¹ Global history pushes us to apprehend the past across a range of analytically distinct levels of scale, each with its own heuristic potential; to place these tiers in dialogue through a deliberate orchestration of perspectives that refines and thickens our understanding of the past, in a collective and corrective practice. As such, global history is less liable than others to what Gaurav C. Garg referred to as ‘defanged empiricism’: that is, descriptive, particularist scholarship that is unable to engage with, let alone alter or affect, our understanding of wider processes and prevailing conceptualizations.Footnote ⁹² Even our enthralment with the telos of global integration has added to the truth of our descriptions of the past. Global historians have, quite rightly, and in another productive form of presentism, recently turned to processes of disconnection, disintegration, and fragmentation.Footnote ⁹³ Of such processes, there have been many, from the fall of Latinity—the process in which Latin declined as a Western lingua franca—to decolonization. Yet there is no denying that, with global integration, scholars have also identified a fundamental historical process, one that undeniably affected how matters unfolded within history; a process, at many times, so central, so commandeering, that without it the past cannot be rightly understood.Footnote ⁹⁴

This historian is no oracle, but the present will continue to draw our attention to aspects of the past, adding to the ever-changing ‘selection of facts’ that constitutes history. From the vantage point of the mid-2020s, it seems reasonable to anticipate a growing body of productively presentist work over the next few years on global energy crises and climate anomalies; the worldwide repercussions of warfare and refugee movements; illiberal internationalism and great-power rivalries. So, too, are likely a renewed interest in the history of technological revolutions, of epistemic uncertainty and distortion; perhaps, as well, histories of regress, of aftermaths—of disease outbreaks, or regime change—and of historical futures as menace.Footnote ⁹⁵ Yet while the present and its politics is bound to inform our scholarship, we will also continue to write histories—including global histories—that resonate less directly and straightforwardly with our own moment. As the late Carlo Ginzburg observed, ‘history must be studied even when it has no visible relation to contemporary issues’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nothing earthly—and certainly nothing human—is alien to the global historian. So long as a proper understanding of their object of inquiry requires the world, there their ‘quarry lies’.Footnote ⁹⁷

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The ecumenical, relational, and non-parochial histories of the past few decades—of which the Journal of Global History has become the most prominent home—have altered the face of history. Our ever-incomplete descriptions and explanations of the past now abound with themes and questions, with persons and processes that twenty years ago—let alone at the time of Bloch’s or Mann’s writing—no one would have imagined might one day be part of history. Ours are histories that were ‘completely unthinkable’ or ‘literally unimaginable’ only a few decades ago.Footnote ⁹⁸

Some of this is owing to the global historians who have helped produce a broadened and deepened history: one that has shocked the wider field out of its certainties and into new truths. Such histories have been animated, in part, by the friction between past and present that, at its best, opens ‘a portal to new interpretation’ of both.Footnote ⁹⁹ Standing on the shoulders of giants—area, post-colonial, and subaltern studies, which first urged us to ‘provincialize’, and decentre Europe—global historians have ‘radically altered our sense of what is central and what is marginal in the past’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They have expanded our angles of vision and our analytical agility and strength; they have enriched the fullness of our view and the completeness of our ever-incomplete explanations. They have taught us to look not only for answers but for questions ‘everywhere’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Twenty years on, global historians know their field’s value and purpose, its limitations and difficulties, its strengths and its truths. They know that they have brought the world into history—and that this is no small thing.