HUNT, Lynn. Writing history in the global era. New York: W. W.

Norton & Company, 2014

Two new development are reshaping the history: cultural history has lost it vitality, and
globalization is what matters now. P. 1

“Is globalization the new theory that will reinvigorate history? Or will it choke off all other
possible contenders, leaving in place only the inevitability of modernization of the world on the
Western model?” p. 1

“History reinforced and in many cases created national identity.” P. 2

“The story of the nation’s rise provided the common threads to bind together disparate peoples,
whether of different ethnic groups, different classes, or different regions.” P. 3

“History consequently grew as a discipline in a symbiotic relationship with nationalism in the

nineteenth century and twentieth centuries.” P. 3

“With the rise of universal education and repressive government, history was (and is now)
taught to students in primary and secondary schools with the chief aim of making them feel
kinship with the other citizens of their nation.” P. 3

“Democratization of national history went hand in hand with democratization of the university.
The experiences of workers, slaves, indigenous peoples, women, and minorities could no longer
be ignored.” P. 6

New social history

Soboul and Thompson

“In the United States, the rise of social history helped anchor contemporary movements for
labor organizing, feminism, and minority rights of all kinds, thus giving history yet another
political purpose: cementing the identities of the excluded around a newly discovered past of
prejudice and discrimination.” P. 6-7

More inclusive national narration

Influences of Marx, Weber, Durkheim: each of them offered some version of modernization
theory

“Studies influenced by modernization theory suffered a similar fate. The idea of modernity itself
came to be seen as excessively tied to Western values and models of development. The simple
truth was that scholars invariably identified the modern in modernization theories with the well-
known paths of development in Western Europe and the United States.” P. 8

“A focus on culture offered a way out of these impasses, and with that new focus came host of
new theories.” P. 9

Language, symbols, rituals, religions,

Linguistic turn, poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, cultural studies…

“The question of purpose is espeacially vital since the possibility of establishing truth in history
and sometimes led to assertions that history as an academic discipline was inherently
Eurocentric and therefore of limited use in the present.” P. 9

THE RISE AND FALL OF CULTURAL THEORIES

Cultural theories: 1970s onwards

Four major paradigms of historical research in the post-World War II: Marxism, modernization,
the Annales school, identity politics. P. 13

Paradigm (Kuhn)

Marxism: Soboul and Thompson

Modernization: Weber and Durkheim

“[…] Western path of modernization as a model for the rest of the world.” P. 15

Annales: Bloch, Febvre, Braudel

“Annales school emphasized social and economic history and the relationship between history
and the social sciences.” P. 16

Identity politics: arose in response to social movements p. 17

Fertile ground for the history of excluded and marginalized groups.

“The history of identities is now spreading scross the globe because all countries now face
pressing issues about national identity and the role of women, minorities, and immigrants in
society and politics.” P. 18

“Cultural theories overturned those assumptions and insisted instead that culture has its own
autonomous logic; language and cultural expressions shape the social world, including the
economy, and cannot simply be delivered from them.” P. 19

Stuart Hall, Claude Levi-Strauss

“The rules of language and kinship are produced and reproduced in cultures: they govern the
thinking and acting of individuals but are not consciously present in the minds of individuals.
Lévi-Strauss showed, in short, that culture has its own rules, its own autonomy, and its own
power.” P. 21

Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes

Order of Things. Foucault.

“The discursive formation determines what can be said and not said. It shapes the “regime of
truth”, which is therefore itself contingent, a product of discourse, and at the same time also
productive of knowledge. The regime of truth produces knowledge, rather than knowledge
producing truth. Truth is not objective, outside power, not a product of a mind-liberating itself
from prejudice or superstition, as in the Enlightenment narrative.” P. 24

Clifford Geertz, p. 26
“Examination of cultural representations took priority over the analysis of social and economic
conditions.” P. 30

“Despite the growing influence of cultural theories, their relationship with non-Western
countries remains paradoxical: the approaches of postmodernism have been used to criticize
Eurocentrism, but at the same time, most of the elements of those critiques have been derived
from Western sources.” P. 32

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Orientalism, Edward Saïd p. 33

“Western historians now read histories of the non-West and are expecting to find material and
approaches that will influence their work. They must do so if only because they have become
much more aware of the embeddedness of their supposedly European subjects in a global
context.” P. 34

“Cultural theories, too, were a cultural representation and subject to the same kind of critique
those theories had levelled against the four paradigms” p. 36

THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization: long-term, or new?

Internet

“Globalization as a stage in the development of capitalism.”

“Specialization followed from the drive of history and other social science and humanities fields
to emulate science. To ben an ‘expert’ meant mastering a field of study, picking a pertinent
problem to examine, undertaking research on it, and publishing the findings.” P. 48

“Until the 1980s, however, world history generally meant the history of western civilization. […]
The establishment of the World Association in 1982 marked the moment when world history
began to move away from a Eurocentric focus to a more polycentric one.” P. 49

“History has not lost its mobilizing power. A more globally oriented history might well serve
to encourage a sense of international citizenship, of belonging to the world and not just one’s
own nationality, but this outcome is as yet far more a promise than a reality.” P. 51

Globalization and interdependence. P. 52-53

Inexorability of globalization p. 55

Braudel – Wallerstein – Gunder Frank p. 56-57

Focus on economics

“The absorption of three of the previous paradigms of historical research into one overarching
globalization paradigm has two potentially troubling consequences: it shifts attention to macro-
historical (worldwide) and especially macroeconomic trends, and it ensconces the assumption
that economic shapes all other aspects of life. In short, the globalization paradigm reinstates the
very suppositions that cultural theories had criticized, and thus potentially threatens to wash
away against the gains of the last decades of cultural history.” P. 59

Top-down perspectives: too economic

Bottom-up, p. 64 Do not need to be economic

p. 68 bottom-up paradigm

“The West did not globalize the world on its own; adventurous and enterprising people across
the world brought their various locales into greater interconnection and interdependence with
each other. Since globalization is not therefore a uniquely Western creation, the globalization
paradigm must be modified to take account of these multiple origins and processes.” P. 70

Globalization is not the same thing as westernization

“Economic dominance does not necessarily translate into other forms of superiority” But it
usually does it.

RETHINKING SOCIETY AND THE SELF

Society and the self: “They are foundational in the sense that they make writing of secular
history possible, but because they foundational, they are simply taken for granted rather
examined in sustained fashion. […] All four major paradigms of historical researches in the post-
war period assumed that the self and identity were shaped, if not entirely determined, by
society, that is, by social conditions. At the same time, they nonetheless assumed that once
individuals understood the ways in which they were socially conditioned, they would be able to
act upon their knowledge and remake the social world.” P. 78-79

Annales: Febvre e Bloch

Cultural studies: “While arguing for the relative autonomy of culture, cultural studies and
postmodern theories often ended up giving even more determining power to culture,
language or discourse and virtually erasing the individual’s capacitiy to act upon their
knowledge.” P. 79

“[…] in short, society came to be seen as the secular organization of the nation around
common laws, customs, or institutions.” P. 81-82

“Secularization in the west went hand in hand with the belief that society insitutues itself,
whether through a social contract or some other means.” P. 84

“[…] so too humanities and social sciences as developed in the west have had great influence
on the cultures of knowledge of the rest of the world.” P. 88

“What matters then is the international flow and network of people, commodities, and
information. In short, society can no longer be identified with the nation-state because social
relations no longer fit within the nation-state’s boundaries.” P. 90

Relation with animals

Environmental history

Natural rights, rights of men

Individual autonomy

“Both agency and historical change depend on this interactive relationship between embodied
selves and the social or collective dimensions of life.” P. 116

NEW PURPOSES, NEW PARADIGMS

“A first step, then, is to recognize that history as it unfolds has no set course, even if our
attempts to narrate it slip such teleological elements back in.” p. 128

“[…] these processes should not be thought of as arrow flying straight to their targets. There are
no targets. Cultures appears and disappear, social interactions and differentiation can stop or
speed ep, hegemony over territory varies in its duration and has never been permanent, and
technological development is never uniform, much less uniformly positive, is its outcomes. All
kinds of unexpected consequences can attend the movement of the various arrows.” P. 128