“Centrisms: Questions of Privilege and Perspective in Global Historical Scholarship”, in Jürgen Osterhammel & Stephanie Gänger (eds.), Rethinking Global History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp. 254-273.
Dominic Sachsenmaier – 2024
This chapter deals with various aspects of centrism in global historical scholarship. It firstly inquires whether as a research field, global history has developed distinct ways of defining narrative centres. Within an eye on longer academic transformations, it secondly contextualises the growing critiques of Eurocentrism in different parts of the world. On that basis, the chapter thirdly investigates various efforts overcome the long tradition of hegemonic perspectives that characterise different branches of global history as a research field. It then turns to the lived realities of academic historiography, considering it as a professional field that is comparable to other global professional realms. Doing this brings a very obvious inconsistency to the surface: our concepts have changed, our global thought has become decentred, and there has been a growing consensus when it comes to criticising Eurocentrism and other forms of hegemonic thinking. However, while this marks a great change in our disciplinary cultures, many of the hierarchies in the worldwide patterns of historiographical knowledge production that emerged during the nineteenth century are surprisingly intact today. This poses a particular problem to historical scholarship operating on a transregional and global level