Diego Olstein’s task in Thinking history globally is to develop a framework and methodology for understanding the logic of global history. It is an enormous undertaking. The passing of the Islamic and European intercommunicating zones after the Second World War produced a rich historiography about globalization and its origins. Olstein, an associate professor of history and Associate Director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, reviews this historiography, using four strategies – comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing. He applies these strategies to what he identifies as the twelve branches of global history. The twelve branches are comparative history, relational history, new international history, transnational history, oceanic history, civilizational analysis, historical sociology, world system approach, global history, the history of globalization, world history, and big history.
Olstein discusses the four strategies and twelve branches in nine chapters. In each chapter, he clearly defines the strategies and branches, concisely introduces the reader to their literature, and conscientiously provides tables and figures to support his discussion.
In Chapter 1, Olstein takes the reader to Argentina under Juan Perón (1946–55). This foundational chapter shows how theory is turned into practice. Perón’s populism and authoritarianism are compared, connected, conceptualized, and contextualized with similar phenomena in other nation-states. In Chapter 2, Olstein elaborates on the intellectual origins of the twelve branches. In the historical sociology branch, he includes Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French observer of American democracy, among the original thinkers but fails to mention W. E. B. DuBois, the African American scholar whose pioneering work identified ‘the color line’ as an essential international problem in the twentieth century. Chapters 3 and 4 probe the depths of the comparing and connecting strategies and how they differ in crossing borders. He exemplifies these differences through three examples – ‘dawn of civilization’, ‘imperial history’, and ‘the American divergence’, which began after 1500 CE and not ‘from around 1500 BCE onward’ (as given on p. 62). The comparative method is a scholarly mature one. It compares two or more phenomena, pointing out similarities or differences. The connection method is an intellectually emerging one. It connects two or more phenomena, relating them to one another. Chapter 5 further explores the connection method. The new histories of international, transnational, and oceanic bring into focus the relationships between units of analysis that are geographical, nation-state, and thematic. Oceanic history is arguably the most informative branch as reflected in the works of K. N. Chaudhuri, Steven R. Fischer, and John H. Elliott.Footnote 1
For Chapter 6, Olstein surveys the conceptualization of global history through the lens of three branches located in the social sciences. The first branch is historical sociology. It has roots and application in the academic discipline of sociology. The second branch is civilizational analysis. It takes an evolutionary and expansive view of human society such as Chinese civilization as opposed to the Chinese empire. The third branch is the world-system approach. It brings into focus scholarly concerns about the origins of inequality and causes of underdevelopment in the modern world economy. These branches lead into Olstein’s discussion about the difference, if not subtle rivalry, between world history and global history in Chapter 7. At the centre of the debate between the two histories is how to study, write, and teach the chronology and periodization of globalization. The problem may very well be one of definition. But it is also one of context. Chapter 8 addresses the contextual problem. For example, the contrast between Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in world history: power and the politics of difference and John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: the rise and fall of global empires, 1400–2000 illustrates how the chronological divide between world history and global history is also a contextual divide.Footnote 2 That divide can highlight long-term patterns as in the Burbank and Cooper book or it can reveal modern processes as in the Darwin book. One possible bridge over the divide is big history, which embraces all aspects of life.
In Chapter 9, Olstein concludes this extended historiographical review and engaged intellectual history with a case study. He applies the four strategies and the twelve branches to the First World War. While primarily a violent argument among European industrialized powers, the conflict had a direct and indirect effect upon non-industrialized societies, communities, and peoples on land and sea. It was a world war. It was a global affair. And it was big history. At the end of the book, Olstein provides what he calls an ‘analytical bibliography’; it is a valuable and informed bibliography, which organizes global historiography into teaching and research categories.
Mature students, advanced researchers, and the intellectually curious will find Thinking history globally a welcomed addition to their libraries. After all, humanity now lives in the era of the global intercommunicating zone which is the whole world.
