1. INDIA IN A WORLD: DILEMMAS OF SOVEREIGNTY
ABSTRACT
Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam prompts a consideration not only of the histories of Islam and early modern connected histories of Central and South Asia, but also of current debates about local and global history-writing. Moin's work intersects with a strand of comparative world history—following Victor Lieberman's Strange Parallels—but also engages strands of historical anthropology, bringing to light a range of compelling stakes for global historians, historians of South Asia, and scholars of nationalism alike. Though Moin's work pushes the boundaries of connected histories centered on South Asia, his focus on a trans-regional millennial science avoids questions of the local within new global histories.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12002
2. OF SOVEREIGNS, SACRED KINGS, AND POLEMICS
ABSTRACT
In its emphasis on ritual and sacred kingship, Azfar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign bears the imprint of anthropological theory, but Moin addresses this inheritance only obliquely. This essay seeks to draw out that tradition and to place theories of sovereignty and sacred kingship in their intellectual and historical context. Ultimately, it questions the value of these theories to the study of political authority.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12003
4. IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY IN MUGHAL AND BRITISH FORMS
ABSTRACT
Azfar Moin's recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12005
A WORLD CONNECTING? FROM THE UNITY OF HISTORY TO GLOBAL HISTORY
ABSTRACT
Global history looms large in current historiography, yet its heuristic design and political functions remain ill-reflected. My article seeks to uncover the historical origins of the assumption that the “world” has one common history and that it is feasible and desirable to write it. I analyze the epistemic infrastructure underlying this assumption and argue that global history as practiced today is predicated on a specific mode of world-making that provides its basic template: Global history both grew out of and intellectually sustains the conception of an increasingly connected world. The type of connectedness thereby implied and reinscribed was established by what I call the “world-historical process,” a cognitive framework that co-emerged with the early modern and modern European conquest of the world through expansion, discovery, commerce, and culture. The article investigates how this process-template emerged out of the crisis of universal history that could no longer integrate and reconcile the multiple pasts of the world. The format of the world-historical process was central to Enlightenment historians' assertion of the secular and scientific prestige of their craft, as much as to its ability to discern global epochs, in particular the modern and the premodern. My article traces the fortunes of this template through historicism up to present-day global history. Current global history remains structured around the growing connectedness of previously distinct parts of the planet whose pasts are transformed into relevant world history by the very process that makes them increasingly interrelated. Global history may be too much a product of the process of globalization it studies to develop epistemologically and politically tenable alternatives to “connectivity.”
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12000
THE TRUTH HURTS: VERA SCHWARCZ’S HEARTFELT QUEST
ABSTRACT
Vera Schwarcz offers a penetrating examination of the concept and meaning of “truth” in China (antiquity to contemporary) and elsewhere (primarily in the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible to contemporary thinkers). Highly critical of the sharp turn toward cultural relativism which abandons the search for truth in the name of everyone having his or her own situated truths, she examines in particular how scholars, philosophers, and writers living in dark times have sought to cut through the enforced amnesia of oppressive regimes, especially that of post-1949 China. This broad-ranging search brings numerous great minds into a kind of transtemporal, transcultural conversation, voices rarely, if ever, discussed between the covers of the same book.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12009
POSTMODERNISM, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND HISTORY: RETURNING TO AN UNFINISHED AGENDA
ABSTRACT
Recognizing that the vogue of postmodernism has passed, Simon Susen seeks to assess whatever enduring impact it may have had on the social sciences, including historiography. Indeed, the postmodern turn, as he sees it, seems to have had particular implications for our understanding of the human relationship with history. After five exegetical chapters, in which he seems mostly sympathetic to postmodernism, Susen turns to often biting criticism in a subsequent chapter. He charges, most basically, that postmodernists miss the self-critical side of modernity and tend to overreact against aspects of modernism. That overreaction is evident especially in the postmodern preoccupation with textuality and discourse, which transforms sociology into cultural studies and historiography into a form of literature. But as Susen sees it, a comparable overreaction has been at work in the postmodern emphasis on new, “little” politics, concerned with identity and difference, at the expense of more traditional large-scale politics and attendant forms of radicalism. His assessment reflects the “emancipatory” political agenda he assigns to the social sciences. Partly because that agenda inevitably affects what he finds to embrace and what to criticize, aspects of his discussion prove one-sided. And he does not follow through on his suggestions that postmodernist insights entail a sort of inflation of history or historicity. Partly as a result, his treatment of “reason,” universal rights, and reality (including historiographical realism) betrays an inadequate grasp of the postmodern challenge—and opportunity. In the last analysis, Susen's understanding of the historical sources of postmodernism is simply too limited, but he usefully makes it clear that we have not put the postmodernist challenge behind us.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12008
FORGERY AND THE SPECTER OF PHILOLOGY
ABSTRACT
Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain chronicles and unravels historiographical strands made of the complicated lives and afterlives of a set of manuscripts and printed books in defense of the Spanish church and its saints and martyrs against the Roman post-Tridentine reform of Christian sacred history. Olds studies one particular Jesuit historian, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera (1538–1611) and his notorious “falsos cronicones,” in which he rewrote and invented historical archives in order to prove the antiquity of Spanish Christianity. Olds's enticing narrative and thorough research prove the point that forgery is also a “mode of historical writing,” and the only reproach one might level at this fine book is the narrow focus on Spain when it comes to discussing the reception of the Chronicles. Reading this book, however, inspires and raises larger questions, including the use of forgeries for patriotic (national) histories and the ethics of historical scholarship. By looking into recent statements by Sheldon Pollock, a philologist and intellectual historian of South Asia, and by Hayden White in his recent The Practical Past, this article argues that in spite of their different methodologies, they both converge in defining the task of a historian as doing something other than supporting national, patriotic, technocratic, and “market-oriented” agendas.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12011
WHAT IS HISTORY? WHAT IS LITERATURE?
ABSTRACT
Ivan Jablonka seeks something other than a mere combination of history, social science, and literature. He would like history, itself understood as a social science, to be a literature of the real world. He is also interested in literature informed not only by the results but, more important, by the forms of reasoning and inquiry of history and related social sciences (notably anthropology and sociology). Jablonka's own positioning within the Annales seems obvious, notably in his stress on cognition, problem-oriented research, and the status of history as a social science. But the attention and research devoted in the work of scholars in and around the Annales to the relations among history, literature, and fiction have not been pronounced, and in this context Jablonka inflects the understanding of history in relatively underdeveloped directions. Despite possible disagreements one may have over specific issues, Jablonka's thought-provoking book raises very important questions, opens many significant avenues of inquiry, and seeks a desirable interaction between historical and literary approaches.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2Fhith.12007