Global History

Global History

Objectives

• A multidisciplinary outlook to understand the process of our global world
• History as a tool to read economic, political and cultural phenomena of the past and (hopefully) of the present

Globalization as we perceive it

Definition: Termine adoperato, a partire dagli anni 1990, per indicare un insieme assai ampio di fenomeni, connessi con la crescita dell’integrazione economica, sociale e culturale tra le diverse aree del mondo.

Economia

• G. dei mercati (liberalizzazione)
• Effetti della globalizzazione
• I flussi commerciali
• I movimenti di capitali
• Il mercato del lavoro

Scienze sociali

• Comunicazioni e migrazioni
• La formazione di una società civile internazionale

The Eighties

Pac-Man is an arcade game developed first released in Japan in May 1980. It was created by Japanese video game designer Toru Iwatani. It was licensed for distribution in the United States in October 1980. It became a social phenomenon that yielded high sales of merchandise and inspired a legacy in other media, such as the Pac-Man animated television series. Between 1980 and 1987, 300,000 gaming machines and millions of gadgets were sold worldwide.

Live Aid was a benefit concert held on Saturday 13 July 1985, and an ongoing music-based fundraising initiative. The original event was organised by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for relief of the Ethiopian famine. Billed as the "global jukebox", the event was held simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London, England, United Kingdom and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. On the same day, concerts inspired by the initiative happened in other countries, such as the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, Yugoslavia, Austria, Australia and West Germany. An estimated global audience of 1.9 billion, across 150 nations, watched the live broadcast. If accurate, this would be nearly 40% of the world population at the time.

Global definition

Covering or affecting the whole world: global issues; The commission is calling for a global ban on whaling; the company’s domestic and global markets.

Globalization

The fact that different cultures and economic systems around the world are becoming connected and similar to each other because of the influence of large multinational companies and of improved communication. It is the process of interaction and integration between people, companies, and governments worldwide. Globalization has grown due to advances in transportation and communication technology. With increased global interactions comes the growth of international trade, ideas, and culture. Globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration that's associated with social and cultural aspects. However, conflicts and diplomacy are also large parts of the history of globalization, and modern globalization.

Contents

• The concepts of Global and Globalization
• The current debate on Global History and the origins of Global History: is there a Global/ World Italian History? The case of Storia mondiale dell’Italia (2017)
• How the World became Global: the process of Globalization during the Early Modern Age

Networks

• Commercial networks
• Networks of information
• Networks of communication
• The state-nation
• Democracy and Human Rights
• Public Health and Welfare
• Cultural networks

Global History deals mainly with connection, exchange and circulation

1. Things
2. People
3. Ideas
4. Institutions

1- Commercial networks

How trade creates commercial networks which globally connected the world during the early modern and modern ages:

• Silk Road
• Slave trade
• Silver trade (a part of the ‘Columbian exchange’)
• Ports and free-ports Silk road: trade of global goods like sugar, silver, cocoa, coffee and tea.

Port-cities (Indian Ocean): Makassar, Bantam, Malacca, Surat and Aden

Merchant cities (Central Asia): Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, Kabul, Herat, Baghdad and Tabriz

2- Networks of information

How the modern society of information was created; How news begins to circulate.

• Agents: journalists, merchants, missionaries, travellers
• Media: newspapers and gazettes
• Places: cafes, taverns, market squares, salons, academies. Masonic lodges
• Tools: paper, printing industry, orality

3- Networks of communication

How distant places were connected during the early modern age; How goods were sent from place to place; How people traveled from place to place.

• The postal system
• Grand tour routes
• Travellers and tourists

4- The state-nation

• How state-nations were established during the early modern age
• How state-nations began to interact and how international law and a system of global international relations were created
• How the European model of state-nation was reused in other contexts

5- Democracy and Human Rights

• How the principle of democracy and human rights affirmed themselves during the early modern age
• How they were ‘fixed’ in Constitutions
• How Constitutions ‘traveled’ all around the world

6- Public Health and Welfare

• When and how the concepts of Public Health and Welfare began to appear
• How scientific and medical development changed society
• Epidemics and vaccine

7- Cultural Networks

• How cultural networks were established during the early modern age
• How culture began to create global models and ‘products’
• Celebrity
• Fashions
• Best sellers
• Souvenirs

What is global history?

Global History is an analytical perspective and it is not a territorial object.

Local, national and global

Global History can be a way to re-interpret also national and local history, it is a way to overcome eurocentrism. Study of the case of SMALLPOX.

Process and relations

Global History aims to find and understand the historical origins of globalization. It is the study of transnational processes and global relations. Therefore, global history deals mainly with connection, exchange, and circulation between Things, People, Ideas, and Institutions.

Types of Global History

• A history with a global horizon
• A history of global relations
• A history of global integration

Histories

• Global History
• World History
• Transnational History
• ≠ (Traditional) national History

Time and space and relations

History and the world:

• Herodotus (5 B.C.)
• Polybius (3 B. C.)
• Sima Qian (2-1 B. C.)
• Rashid Ad-Din Fadal Allah (13-14 centuries)
• Ibn-Khaldun (14-15 centuries)

Ecumenic history

Othering Ethnography

In Chalco, central Mexico, Domingo Chimalpahin (1579-1660) writes a world history in NAHUATL language talking about Europe and the Americas but also about China, Russia, the Mongol Empires, Persia and Africa.

Giovanni Battista Ramusio: Navigazioni e viaggi: map of Hochelaga (Canada), 1556 Giovanni Battista Ramusio: Navigazioni e viaggi: map of Africa

Marcin Bielski: Universal Chronicle Universal History: It was published in London in 65 volumes between 1736 and 1765.

Voltaire

One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture, population. He has written an « Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations »

Edward Gibbon

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Nineteenth Century History

• LEOPOLD VON RANKE (1795-1886): Nation and progress
• Critical reading of primary sources
• Global context

Bartolomé Mitre

Argentina’s founding fathers: San Martin the Liberator

Historians and Paradigms

Histories: How the growing intensity of geographical discovery and exchanges changed the way historians did their job, from the origins to the nineteenth century. How few paradigms were developed by historians during the twentieth century to explain how the world became global.

The world system theory

• Core countries
• Semi-periphery countries
• Periphery countries: unified by the division of labour

World Economies

Post-colonial studies: how the Western created commonplace and untrue images of Eastern societies and how these images ended up becoming a justification for imperialism.

Networks

Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture

What matters are connections and transfer of goods, information and people. An information society was already in place at the end of the 15th century.

Economy, Culture, Communication

• The fundamental importance of networks, connections, and relations over nations and borders
• All these different factors and phenomena began during the early modern age.

Debates

1- Eurocentrism

The historical role of Europe and the US (the ‘West’) in global development. The West is not the only protagonist. Other agents: the Moghul, Ottoman, and Chinese empires. From the 18th century, the West has gained global pre-eminence:

• The integration of capitalistic global markets
• Technological and military superiority
• Universal values such as human rights

Global integration is never a one-way linear process

2- Periodization

Globalization can help in reading the past:

• Economic integration
• Relationship between state-nation and global market
• Cultural homologation
• The emergence of new concepts of time and space in relation to the changes in transportation and communication

Globalization is a perspective. Periodization: J. H. Bentley. Periodization: a genealogy

Why the 15th century? It is not Eurocentric. For instance, it highlights the two-way exchange between Europe and the Americas and not only the imposition of Western Capitalism and Imperialism which happened during the 19th century. It does take into account also cultural, technological and scientific (etc…) factors and not only political and economic ones.

Serge Gruzinski: it started during the 16th century. Portugal and Spain: global empires. Japan: images of ‘Western barbarians’. Mexico: stories about king Henry IV of France in indigenous languages. New Spain: stories about the Ottoman empire were written by Germans emigrants.

3- A Global Conscience: Asia or Europe?

• Marx: economic factors > mode of production
• Weber: cultural and institutional factors > Protestant ethic
• Frank: economic factors > riches of America
• Pomeranz: economic and technological factors > coal and wood

The Yangtze Delta Region

4- Early Modernities

Themes and fields

1. Global goods:
   • Silk, spices, and porcelain: from the Far East to Europe
   • Silver: from West (Americas) to the Far East (via Europe)
   • Potatoes and corn: from West (Americas) to the Far East (via Europe)
   • Sugar and Tea: during the 18th century, sugar was:
     1. A status symbol
     2. A medicine
     3. A means to preserve foods
     4. A sweetener for tea.

   Also, tea became a best-seller. It was a luxury from India paid with silver from South America. The commerce of luxury goods is one of the main elements of globalization and it started during the 18th century, involving all social classes.

2. Oceans: Fernand Braudel La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II (1949)
3. Migrations:
   • 60 million Europeans left for the New World
   • 30-45 million people left India
   • 50 million people left Russia and Northern Asia to populate Siberia and Manchuria
   • 19 million people left China and went to South Asia
4. Empire
5. Nation:
   • State-nations emerged at the beginning of the early modern age. One of the most notable and studied cases is France
   • The European state-nation became a global standard and one of the causes of the dissolution of multinational empires when many ‘Nations’ sought independence.
   • It was from state-nations that the necessity of international law and international relations emerged
6. Environment

Global and Local: the case of Italy

Storia mondiale dell’Italia

• 1496: Global Venice
• The Battle of Lepanto October 7th 1571
• Christian fleet: 208 ships (Spain, Venice, Papal States)
• Ottoman fleet: 180 ships (Algiers, Alexandria of Egypt, Rhodes, Tripoli, Gallipoli in Turkey, Chios)
• Pope Pius V: (Michele Antonio Ghislieri) Before becoming Pope, he was an Inquisitor. He compiled the first Index librorum prohibitorum. His main goal was fighting against heretics (according to him all non-Catholics: Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Atheists)
• 1591: Livorno becomes Global
• 1764, a Global Book: Written by Cesare Beccaria, helped by Pietro Verri, Published in 1764 in Livorno, translated into French and published in Paris in 1766. 1764-1899: it was translated into 76 languages
• Dei delitti e delle pene: All men are equal before the law. Laws are agreements between free and equal men, therefore they must safeguard human rights. Torture and death penalty are illegitimate and must be abolished
• The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus was created in the 16th century by Ignazio de Loyola. Its main goal was the defense and propagation of the faith. By the 18th they were globally spread. They were banned from Portugal, France, Spain, the kingdom of Naples and the Grand Duchy of Parma. Ultimately pope Clemens XIV abolished the Society in 1773.

A clash for global power

Napoleon in Italy 1806: the naval blockade In 1806, Napoleon proclaimed a continental blockade: no British ship could enter any port under French control. Smuggling prospered: the main centers were Goteborg in Sweden, Sicily, and Malta. There was no substitute for British colonial goods: cotton, tobacco, wool, salted fish, wood, lead, and tin. The blockade and the war had a deep influence over Italy

• Discovery of new luxury goods: Marsala wine and citrus fruits
• Decadence of Venice, Ancona, and Naples
• Growth of Genoa, Livorno, and especially Trieste

1864: Global Garibaldi

Garibaldi in London - Why did Giuseppe Garibaldi become a Victorian celebrity? Giuseppe Garibaldi is perhaps best known for helping to unify the various states of the Italian peninsula under one monarchy in 1860. However, Garibaldi’s heroic exploits, which featured in all the major British newspapers of the time, also earned him considerable admiration in England in the 1860s. By the time of his visit to England in 1864, a vibrant cult had flowered around the figure of Garibaldi in the United Kingdom.

Garibaldi in the home As popular affection for this rugged Italian revolutionary increased in England, various trinkets depicting Garibaldi started to become commercially available. Most notable were the china Garibaldi figurines, produced in Staffordshire in the early 1860s, which represent Garibaldi in numerous guises and poses. As well as figurines, Garibaldi also appeared on plates, cups, and tankards, and his name was adopted by pubs and taverns across the country.

Garibaldi in the drawing room Such was Garibaldi's popularity that, when the General visited the United Kingdom in April 1864, aristocrats and politicians vied for the opportunity to host and dine with him. While in London, Garibaldi was frequently entertained by the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland and her son, the Duke of Sutherland, and stayed for some time at the Sutherland country residence at Cliveden. The dowager duchess even caused a small scandal at a dinner at Stafford House, her London residence, when she allegedly invited Garibaldi to her private boudoir for a cigar.

A hero for all English men and women By the mid-1860s, the English were truly enraptured with Garibaldi. While the upper classes competed for the opportunity to meet Garibaldi during his visit, the middle and working classes expressed their admiration for the General by adorning their walls and mantelpieces with his image. A prominent spectacle both in public and in the home, Garibaldi had become a true celebrity in nineteenth-century England.

A 'Global’ Italy

• The discovery of the Americas (Marcocci)
• Venice at the end of the 15th century (Zannini)
• The Battle of Lepanto (Visceglia)
• The free-port of Livorno (Caffiero)
• Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (Tortarolo)
• The exiled Jesuits (Guasti)
• The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in Italy (De Francesco)
• The Napoleonic naval blockade (Panciera)
• Global Garibaldi (Riall)

A Global World

Nets and Points

Commercial Networks

Antonio De Pereda, Still Life with an Ebony Chest (1652)

• An ebony chest
• A red velvet cloth and a woven cloth
• Five different vessels (two red ceramic vessels decorated with small pieces of quartz from Mexico, a gourd-shaped vessel with silver mounts, a transparent glass vessel, an Italian bowl).
• A chocolatière with a wooden implement
• A Talavera pottery jar
• Boxes filled with chocolate, breads, biscuits, and cheese
• Three cups and a spoon on a silver tray.
• Interior of shop (a. 1680-1700)
• Lacquered chests, cabinet, boxes, and screens
• Chinese porcelains of all shapes and format
• Indian textiles
• Persian paintings
• Ivory objects
• Spices and Christians May 20th, 1498: Vasco de Gama arrives in Calicut
• Cod-fish and Sugar

A Global Finance

• Faenus nauticae (insurance)
• Lettera di cambio (bill of exchange)
• Hansa (transnational company of merchants)
• National debt (The Netherlands 16th)
• Stock Exchange (Antwerp 1531)

A Global Technology

• The compass
• The print
• The powder

Global Travels

• Demographic growth
• To make more profit
• To evangelize
• For scientific curiosity

The Mediterranean Sea

• Towards West
• The Atlantic Ocean: Spain: Latin America Portugal: Brazil and Africa Britain: North America and the Caribbean The Netherlands: the Caribbean and Baltic Sea
• Slaves and Sugar

The Slave Trade

• 1503: The first shipment of slaves arrives in America
• 1450-1600: 2,500 slaves per annum
• 1601-1700: 18,680 slaves per annum
• 1701-1800: 61,330 slaves per annum
• 15th – 19th: 9,000,000 slaves
• 5% US
• 38% Brazil
• 37% Caribbean
• 10-20% died during the travel

Commercial Networks

The Indian and Pacific Oceans

Global Goods and their impact

• Monopoly
• Competition
• Commerce and War
• Social and cultural changes