Cultural HistoryPub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.3366/cult.2020.0223
Matthias Middell
{"title":"From Universal History to Transregional Perspectives: The Challenge of the Cultural and Spatial Turn to World and Global History in the 1970s and Today","authors":"Matthias Middell","doi":"10.3366/cult.2020.0223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2020.0223","url":null,"abstract":"The article reconstructs the development of global history since the crisis of universal history in the 1970s, which under the weight of poststructuralist arguments had almost brought world history writing to a standstill. In contrast, the new approach, now labelled global history, which had taken up many of the suggestions of the cultural and spatial turn and coincided with the social interest in global connectivity, developed into an extraordinarily attractive form of historiography. Since the mid-2010s, however, criticism has been on the rise again, pointing to an inherent ideological globalism and a problematic narrowing towards an Anglo-Saxon model of globalization. However, this is countered by new approaches that once again recall the fruitful dialogue with cultural history, political geography, and area studies.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/cult.2020.0223","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45870246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural HistoryPub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.3366/cult.2020.0225
Antonio Clericuzio
{"title":"Luca Baratta, ‘A Marvellous and Strange Event’: Racconti di nascite mostruose nell'Inghilterra della prima età moderna","authors":"Antonio Clericuzio","doi":"10.3366/cult.2020.0225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2020.0225","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46663972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural HistoryPub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.3366/cult.2020.0220
A. Gerritsen
{"title":"‘A Place full of Trade’: Placing an Early Modern Chinese Town in Global Cultural History","authors":"A. Gerritsen","doi":"10.3366/cult.2020.0220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2020.0220","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the history of Wuchengzhen 吳城鎮, a small town in the inland province of Jiangxi. It explores the history of the town between 1500 and 1850 in terms of both its local significance as an entrepot for trade in grain and tea and its global connections to early modern Europe, by way of the trade in porcelain. The question this paper explores concerns the juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the idea gained from global historians, that during the early modern period, globally traded commodities like tea and porcelain situate a small town like this in a globalized, perhaps even unified or homogenous, world, and on the other hand, the insight gained from cultural historians, that no two people would ever see, or assign meaning to, this small town in the same way. Drawing on this insight, the history of Wuchengzhen is explored on the basis of different textual (administrative records, local gazetteers, merchant manuals) and visual sources (maps and visual depictions of the town), exploring the ways in which the different meanings of the town are constructed in each. The combination of global and cultural history places Wuchengzhen on our map of the early modern world.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41840979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural HistoryPub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.3366/cult.2020.0222
S. Sivasundaram
{"title":"Making the Globe: A Cultural History of Science in the Bay of Bengal","authors":"S. Sivasundaram","doi":"10.3366/cult.2020.0222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/cult.2020.0222","url":null,"abstract":"Starting from Madras, travelling across the Bay of Bengal, to the coast of Sumatra and then to Singapore, this paper provides a cultural history of nineteenth-century knowledge-making as an enterprise in making and breaking three concepts: globe, empire and self. It does so by working outwards from early-nineteenth century pendulum-length experiments to determine the curvature of the Earth. It argues that moving across concepts and scales was vital to a regime of big data. Data-crunching involved different sciences and split across territories and sea and land. As the project of making the globe proceeded, for instance from Madras Observatory, imperial settlements could be located precisely as coordinates, for instance British Singapore, and indigenous intellectuals, like Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (1797–1854), had to find their place in a world of imperial free trade. Global model-making brought about a detachment from individuals and locations as people and places were fixed on a globe and it led to the erasure of the indigenous informant, a key figure in recent histories of science. In linking the making of the globe to the fate of intermediary, the argument urges the need to place indigenous agency in the sciences within wider accounts of labour, capital and imperial expansion.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43594900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cultural HistoryPub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.3366/CULT.2020.0209
C. Albano
{"title":"Forgotten Images and the Geopolitics of Memory: The Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–6)","authors":"C. Albano","doi":"10.3366/CULT.2020.0209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/CULT.2020.0209","url":null,"abstract":"The Italo-Ethiopian war (1935–6) had a profoundly destabilising effect internationally and can be regarded as one of the events that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. Benito Mussolini's occupation of the country (then known as Abyssinia) was facilitated by the massive use of air power and chemical weapons – in ways that at the time were still unprecedented. Mussolini's chemical war, occurring in a country at the periphery of geopolitical spheres of interest, has remained marginal to established historical narratives, rendering it anachronistically topical to today's politics of memory. By examining two films based on archival film footage, respectively Lutz Becker's documentary The Lion of Judah, War in Ethiopia 1935–1936 (1975) and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's video work Barbaric Land ( Paese barbaro, 2013), this article considers the significance of the moving image as a trace of events that have mostly remained visually undocumented and questions its relevance vis à vis today's mediated warfare and the ethics of images.","PeriodicalId":41779,"journal":{"name":"Cultural History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44591921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}