Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The historical profession emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of the nation-state. Historians of the modern period in particular focused above all on the political history of nation-states and the diplomatic history of relations between them. Global aspects of European history were covered mainly in terms of Europe's impact on other parts of the world, as in Hobsbawm's "dual revolution" (the worldwide repercussions of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), or the history of Europe's colonial possessions overseas. And yet there were demonstrable global influences on many key developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, from the liberalism of the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s to the economic impact of the cotton-growing slave economies of the American south. The globalization processes of the late twentieth century have brought these into sharper focus and powered an approach that places Europe's history in a broader global context of mutual interaction. Yet the nation-state is not dead, and national governments are vigorously promoting a return to national histories in the service of patriotic education. Global history is here to stay, but its place in the educational system, particularly school curricula, remains heavily contested.

Histoires globales de l'Europe contemporaineLa profession d'historien est apparue en Europe au xixe siècle, en même temps que l'émergence de l'État-nation. Les historiens de la période moderne et contemporaine se sont surtout concentrés sur l'histoire politique des États-nations et l'histoire diplomatique des relations entre eux. Les aspects globaux de l'histoire européenne ont principalement été abordés sous l'angle de l'influence de l'Europe sur d'autres parties du monde, comme dans la « double révolution » d'Eric Hobsbawm (les répercussions mondiales de la Révolution française et de la révolution industrielle) ou l'histoire des possessions coloniales de l'Europe. Pourtant, de nombreux développements clefs dans l'Europe des xixe et xxe siècles, du libéralisme des révolutions latino-américaines des années 1820 aux retombées économiques de la culture du coton adossée à l'esclavage dans le Sud des États-Unis, furent manifestement sensibles aux influences mondiales. Les processus de globalisation de la fin du xxe siècle ont permis de les mettre en lumière et ont alimenté une approche qui place l'histoire de l'Europe dans un contexte global d'interaction mutuelle. Pourtant, l'État-nation n'est pas mort, et les gouvernements nationaux encouragent vigoureusement un retour aux histoires nationales au service d'une éducation patriotique. Si l'histoire globale n'est pas appelée à disparaître, sa place dans le système éducatif, en particulier dans les programmes scolaires, reste fortement contestée.

My book Cosmopolitan Islanders derives from the Inaugural Lecture I delivered in 2008 as Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. The brief of such a lecture is a tricky one – you have to say something about yourself, something about your field, and something about the discipline of History, and you have to appeal both to colleagues and to the wider world. In addition, in both Oxford and Cambridge, the only two universities with Regius Chairs of History, there have been many famous Inaugurals, by historians as varied as J. B. Bury, Hugh Trevor-Roper and, most famous of all, Lord Acton. In some universities, where professors are all-powerful, the Inaugural has served as a means of laying down the law about how the subject should be taught and researched. But in recent times this has been rare, and it has never really been true in Oxford or Cambridge; the one time that an Oxford Regius, the seventeenth-century specialist Sir Charles Firth, tried this, he ran into a huge amount of trouble and was more or less ostracised in the Faculty for the rest of his career.