News

Prof. Richard Wilk (Indiana University) has written a new book about the history of food globalization from the standpoint of Belize. The books press announcement reads:

There were global foods long before the Big Mac and Coke spread around the world. Belize, a tiny corner of the Caribbean wedged into Central America, has been a "fast food nation" since buccaneers and pirates first stole ashore. As early as the 1600s Belize was already caught in the great paradox of globalization ­ how can you stay "local" and relish your own home cooking, while tasting the delights of the global marketplace?

The story about globalization we hear today is the same all over the world. Every local tradition, all the unique tastes of the world, are being crushed under the steamroller of American fast food. This book tells a more optimistic story, a rich mixture of tragedy and comedy with a colourful cast of characters. Ranging from pirates eating pickled manatee fins to Rastafarians and ecotourists, this book shows how home cooking can never disappear. The same global economy that sends Colonel Sanders charging ashore on tropical beaches, creates a thirst for something real. Far from disappearing, new traditions and new dishes of "real Belizean food" are being served up every day.

The history of Belizean home cooking is an interesting story on its own, illustrated with menus, recipes, and bad colonial poetry. But it also gives us an important new perspective on the perils and problems of globalization. Instead of being crushed underfoot by global giants, even tiny Belize manages to keep cooking up something unique and precious. The problem is that economic globalization and unfair trade make them import all the ingredients.

Sven Beckert (Harvard) published a new article, "From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton," in the Journal of American History 92: September, 2005.

At Arizona State University a center for global studies is in the planning stage, with Professor George Thomas (Sociology) very much involved.

The First European Congress on World and Global History was held in September 2005 at the University of Leipzig. For further information see http://www.uni-leipzig.de/zhs/ekwg/.

Professor Dominic Sachsenmaier was an observer at the conference held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a counterpart to that held at Davos, Switzerland. His report can be found on the Yale Center List Serve, posted at the end of January. It covers an alternate view of globalization to that of the World Economic Forum.

Dominic also was awarded $12,750 by the University of California’s Pacific Rim Program for his research on theories of global history in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He will use most of the money to build up a research team at Fudan University in Shanghai and to travel to the region two to three times over the next twelve months. And, together with Sebastian Conrad, Assistant Professor at the Free University of Berlin, $90,000 from The German National Research Foundation to build up a trans-Atlantic research network in the field of global history. The network will study conceptions of world order between the age of high imperialism (ca. 1880) and the dusk of World War II. The group will cover rivaling schools of thought and ideologies such as socialism, liberalism, or the spectrum of conservative notions.

Columbia University's History Department has opened a special track in International History and Global History as part of the Ph.D. program. It is headed by Professors Adam McKeown and Matthew Connelly, and is also considering the use of The Global History Reader (see below). Publications

Global Inc., a 163 page historical atlas of the Multinational Corporation, was published by New Press. Copies can be ordered from the Press. This atlas is one result of the Conference on Mapping the MNCs, part of the overall NGH initiative. New Press informs us that Global Inc. has just gone into its second printing.

Another outcome is a volume of selected essays from the Conference,entitled Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History, ed. Alfred Chandler and Bruce Mazlish. It has was published by Cambridge University Press.

Palgrave Advances in World History, ed. by Marnie Hughes-Warrington has was published; its 12 chapters should be of much interest to those concerned with the spectrum running from world history to global and new global history.

The Global History Reader, ed. by Akira Iriye and Bruce Mazlish, was published at the beginning of 2005 by Routledge. Professor Iriye has been teaching a course in Japan this year and has used it as a text in his class, giving the book a truly global reach.

John Weaver and others at McMaster University have produced an interesting volume on globalization and autonomy. For more information on McMaster's Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, see the website.

In Current Sociology, Vol 53 No 1 (January 2005), 93-111, Professor Bruce Mazlish has an article, "The Global and the Local," which then gave rise to a further dialogue on the subject. The counterpart of Current Sociology in Russia has asked whether it could republish the article in a Russian translation, thus indicating once again the global interest in globalization.

As part of its work, the NGH initiative has set up a New Global History Press, which is republishing volumes in the Global History Series (previously published by Westview Press) as well as additional titles. Three republished are now available:

• Conceptualizing Global History, ed. B. Mazlish and R. Buultjens
• Global History and Migrations, ed. Wang Gungwu
• Food in Global History, ed. R. Grew.

There is also a new volume, New Global History and the City, based on the Saint Petersburg conference, now available. They can be ordered directly from Andrew Cohn. 60 State Street, Boston, MA 02109.

The Center for Global History at Stony Brook University

Wolf Schäfer has founded The Center for Global History at Stony Brook University in 2003. The Center is currently sponsoring a conference series on “The Global Futures of World Regions.”

The first two conferences—“The New Europe” (April 2005) and “The New America” (September 2005)—were held in Stony Brook (in cooperation with the Center for Italian Studies) and Berlin (in cooperation with the leading Social Science Research Center in Germany ). The next two conferences—“The New Asias” (September 2006) and “The New Third Worlds” (September 2007)—were held in Seoul (in cooperation with the Korean Sociological Association) and again Stony Brook, respectively.

New Associates:

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, Professor of Anthropology and Dean, The University of Michigan-Dearborn (see further her paper in the Globalization and Childhood Conference, reprinted on this web site).

Jennifer Cole, Professor and Member of the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago.

Mary Jane Deeb, Curator of the Middle East collection at the Library of Congress, and former editor of the Middle East Journal. Conversations have been started as to a possible collaboration on a Globalization and the Middle East project.

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Relations, Princeton University, and now Professor at the Center for Globalization and Internationalism, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Paula Fass, Professor in the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley.

Mark Juergensmeyer, Director Global & International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Krishan Kumar, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, recently also joined the New Global History initiative.

Stephen Mennell, Professor of Sociology, Dublin University, Ireland. Editor, Figurations (Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation).

Craig N. Murphy, M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations
at Wellesley College, author of a number of books related to globalization, and currently engaged on a History of UN Development efforts.

Vivien A. Schmidt, Jean Monnet Professor of International Relations at Boston University.

Dennis Smith, Professor of Sociology, Loughborough University, UK. Editor, Current Sociology.

S. Frederick Starr, Chairman, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, The Nitze School-SAIS, John Hopkins University, and Rector for the newly forming Central Asian University. The latter is a tremendously exciting and innovating project. Starr is also interested in the Mapping the NGOs project.

Peter N. Stearns, Provost of George Mason University. A distinguished historian, he is also the editor of Journal of Social History.

Jeremi Suri, Assistant Professor in History at University of Wisconsin- Madison, whose specialization is in international history and American social movements. His book, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente, was published by Harvard University Press in 2003.

Reed Ueda, Professor of History at Tufts University, with various publications in the areas of migration history and American history, currently editing (with Mary C. Waters, Professor of Sociology at Harvard) The New Americans (Harvard U. Press) and The Companion to American Immigration (Blackwell).

Kenneth Weisbrode, research assistant to Professors Iriye and Mazlish on a number of projects, has agreed to serve as web master of the NGH site, taking over from Martin Klimke, and is also the managing editor of New Global Studies.

Joshua Yates, Fellow at the Center on Religion and Democracy, University of Virginia. His research interests fit closely with those of the NGH initiaitive.

Upcoming Events

A conference/project on Globalization and the Middle East is in the planning stage, in cooperation with Mary Jane Deeb of the Library of Congress (where she is in charge of the Middle East collection). As this project develops, further news will be entered here.

Miscellaneous

A Globalization and Childhood Conference was held at George Mason University, 19 to 21 March 2004. The papers were published in the Journal of Social History. The Preface and Conclusion, however, by Peter N. Stearns, the editor of the Journal, can be found under the tab New Publications, along with one of the papers, " The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective," by Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt. The Conference as a whole and these papers open a new and exciting connection between the history of childhood and the New Global History perpective.

The Conference on New Global History and the USA took place, as planned, in collaboration with the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, in New Haven, CT., Oct. 30-Nov. 2, 2003. The project started from a paradox: the USA is the foremost power promoting globalization, but is on many counts pursuing policies that are anti-global in their essence; i.e., the USA is uneasy about living in the global society that it is helping to create. The intent was to look deeply, and in non-partisan fashion, at the historical, cultural, social, etc. roots of this paradox.

A Conference on New Global History and the City took place, January 9-12, 2003, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Read more about the conference proceedings here. Papers and other details about the conference can be found here.

Conference History

Global History, or rather "New Global History", to distinguish it from traditional world history, is a new sub-field of history. It starts from the contemporary phenomenon of globalization, seen as a process, and attempts to understand it from an historical perspective (which it adds to the other ways of dealing with the subject); in adopting this perspective, the new global historian goes as far back into the past as needed to understand the particular aspect of the subject under investigation.

This initiative began with an international conference (funded by the Culpeper Foundation), held in Bellagio, Italy, in 1991, where the first effort was made to conceptualize the new sub-field and to suggest ways to implement it (see Conceptualizing Global History, Westview Press, 1993). The starting point for global history resides in a number of basic facts of our time: a step into space, with its view of "Spaceship Earth"; satellites, making possible instantaneous communication; multinationals; human rights; nuclear weapons; environmental problems; etc. These factors, and others like them, transcend existing national boundaries (though not doing away with the nation state), and interrelate with one another in unprecedented synchronicity and synergy. One result, although not all new global historians agree on this point, is a proposed new periodization-a "global epoch", which some date from the 1950s, others from the 1970s.

Subsequent to the first conference, four other international gatherings have taken place: on "Global Civilization and Local Cultures" (in Darmstadt, Germany, funded by the Technische Hochschule and the Tyssen Foundation), "Global History and Migrations" (in Hong Kong, funded by the University of Hong Kong), "Food and Global History" (in Ann Arbor, Michigan, funded by the University of Michigan and the Toynbee Foundation), and "Mapping the Multinationals" (in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., funded by the Ford Foundation and the RBF). With the exception of the Darmstadt conference, the results have been published in a series on Global History, ed. by Carol Gluck, Raymond Grew and Bruce Mazlish, originally by the Westview Press. (It should also be noted that the Westview series is open-ended, and non-conference volumes can be included. One that has already appeared is Robert P. Clark, The Global Imperative, 1997).