HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

For almost two decades, historians and academics from a wide-range of sub-disciplinary backgrounds have been situating their research within a global context, crossing boundaries both geographically and methodologically, in such large numbers as to necessitate the emergence of a recognisably new field of enquiry: Global History. From comparative to connective histories, the field is still regarded by many as protean, full of potential possibilities and opportunities to provide a heritage to our own globalised and intensively connected world.¹ However, after almost two decades, this vogue perspective has, in many respects, held the field back from presenting more formalised answers and solutions to the almost unending questions and problems historians continue to throw up as they globalise their research. As recently as 2016, the Scottish Centre for Global History's conference on 'Writing Global History' asked far more questions than one might expect in a field maturing into its third decade. Whilst it is absolutely essential that Global Histories continue to problematise the processes of globalisation, as recently demanded by Sebastian Conrad in his survey of the field, nonetheless the contributions in this volume do seek to provide answers – rather than questions – to some of the key challenges which have been posed by the emergence of Global History.² Many of these answer questions directly raised by the notion of the corporation as a protagonist in global history, of course.³ But each contribution also seeks to address issues which have emerged from the longer heritage of Global History as a methodological field. It is therefore necessary to briefly map these before they can be addressed.

Attempts to formally map the heritage of Global History have proliferated in recent years. Unlike, for example, New Imperial History, which has unfortunately seen very few major methodological survey volumes outside of those by Kathleen Wilson and Stephen Howe, there is now no shortage of historiographical reviews of the major trends and constituencies of Global History over the past two decades.⁴ So much so, in fact, that as the truly protean and formative period of Global History continued to spin out into almost boundless directions, the outcome of Oxford's 'New Directions in Global History' conference in 2012 attempted to provide, almost perversely, boundaries, by breaking the field down into three methodologies of analysis: comparativeness, connectedness, and globalisation. These separate analytical fields as outlined by James Belich, John Darwin, Margaret Frenz and Chris Wickham are valuable in helping to delineate what have previously been somewhat interchangeable approaches to writing Global History.⁵ Nonetheless, whilst these categories represent distinct approaches, they should not be regarded as exclusive. The transregional processes of globalisation, for example, demand an analysis of connections which cross regions, alongside the integrative dynamic of comparative models of, say, constitutions, empires, or, in our case, corporations. Whilst untangling analytical categories is useful, they should not be treated exclusively. Thus the contributions in this volume employ all three analytical approaches. It employs a novel comparative approach in studying a multitude of overseas corporations, and in so doing uncovers a transoceanic corporate sociology which integrated a common global framework in the years 1550–1750.

It has become almost customary to begin any review of this field with Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence debate which, for many, impressed the need to situate their research more globally to answer long-standing questions which had remained beyond the historian's reach.⁶ However, the emergence of historians' concern with situating their research within an increasingly global context depends entirely on the somewhat contentious understanding of the distinctions – or similarities, as it were – with World History, a field which has been transforming our understanding of the global much earlier than the Great Divergence debate of the late 1990s and early 2000s.⁷ As Merry Wiesner-Hanks has recently pointed out, the notion that World History is the preserve of teaching whilst Global History has emerged as a research field is quite reductive.⁸ One need only look as far as Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's recent Empires in World History to know that such an argument is specious.⁹ Indeed, despite a tendency for World History to be more comparative, there is little in terms of both methodology and subject-matter to separate the two fields.¹⁰ With that in mind, the 'Great Divergence' debate was very much a product of comparing continental civilizations, such as Europe and Asia, and thus the demarcation between World History and Global History as separate fields of enquiry is far less obvious, and rightly so. The work of Eric Jones and David Landes, for example, whilst promoting global comparisons, was also interested in the structural and natural differences between what were fundamentally different civilizations.¹¹

Source: William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers, https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004387850/BP000001.xml
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