Centre-Periphery and the Global Early Modern Some Historiographical Reflections

HTML PDF
Published: Jul 28, 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/historein.27597
Keywords:
Centre-periphery early modern Europe globality Global early modernity Global Renaissance Politics of history Periodization Orientalism
Giorgos Plakotos
University of the Aegean
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9107-6104
Abstract

The essay draws on the notion of centre-periphery, first, to discuss the politics of history writing and international research and, second, to address some interpretive assumptions that have informed the study of early modernity from a global perspective in the fields of early modern history and studies over the last two decades. The essay argues that appeals to a “global” early modern past often obscure asymmetries of power both as far as the past itself is concerned and the politics of history writing. The use of periodisation concepts such as the “early modern” and the “Renaissance”, which have been developed in European history and historiography, and the distrust of postcolonial theory undermine globality as an interpretive perspective and the endeavour to shake the burden of Eurocentrism.

Article Details
  • Section
  • ARTICLES
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use (with the exception of the non-granted right to make derivative works) with proper attribution for non-commercial uses (licence Creative Commons 4.0). EKT/NHRF retains the worldwide right to reproduce, display, distribute, and use articles published in Historein in all formats and media, either separately or as part of collective works for the full term of copyright. This includes but is not limited to the right to publish articles in an issue of the Journal, copy and distribute individual reprints of the articles, authorize reproduction of articles in their entirety in another EKT/NHRF publication, and authorize reproduction and distribution of articles or abstracts thereof by means of computerized retrieval systems.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Author Biography
Giorgos Plakotos, University of the Aegean

Giorgos Plakotos is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean. He studied history at the University of Athens. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow with a thesis on The Venetian Inquisition and Aspects of “Otherness”: Judaizers, Muslim and Christian Converts (16th–17th century), (2005). His articles have been published in English, Italian, French, and Greek journals, and edited volumes. He has co-authored History of Venice and the Venetian Empire, 11th–18th century: Society, Economy, Culture (Athens, 2015, in Greek) and co-edited Masculinities: Representations, Subjectivities and Practices from Medieval to Modern Times (Athens, 2019, in Greek).

References
“AHR Conversation: On Transnational History.” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006): 1441–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.5.1441.
“AHR Forum.” American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002).
“La longue durée en débat.” Annales HSS 70, no. 2 (2015).
Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta, and Luca Molà. “The Global Renaissance: Cross-Cultural Objects in the Early Modern Period.” In Global Design History, edited by Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley, 11–24. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Andrea, Bernadette, and Linda McJannet, eds. Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Anievas, Alexander, and Kerem Nişancioğlu. “How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 1 (2017): 34–67. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417516000608.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2-2-1.
Baldwin, Peter. “Response to Evans.” Contemporary European History 20, no. 3 (2011): 377–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777311000373.
Baldwin, Peter. “Smug Britannia: The Dominance of (the) English in Current History Writing and Its Pathologies.” Contemporary European History 20, no. 3 (2011): 351–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096077731100035X.
Bayly, Christopher. “History and World History.” In A Concise Companion to History, edited by Ulinka Rublack, 3–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Bentley, Jerry H. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds. The Cambridge World History. Vol. 6: The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE. Part 1: Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Boucheron, Patrick. Julien Loiseau and Yann Potin, eds. Histoire du monde au XVe siècle. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2009.
Broadberry, Stephen, and Bishnupriya Gupta. “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800.” Economic History Review 59, no. 1 (2006): 2–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2005.00331.x
Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Brotton, Jerry. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London: Allen Lane, 2016.
Burke, Peter. “Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances.” Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009): 16–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409348078
Burke, Peter. History and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity, 1992.
Cave, Terence. “Locating the Early Modern.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 29, no. 1 (2006): 12–26. https://doi.org/10.3366/prg.2006.0002.
Chatterjee, Kumkum, and Clement Hawes, eds. Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008.
Chew, Samuel. The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1937.
Cooper, Frederick. “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective.” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3518765
De Vries, Jan. “The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World.” Economic History Review 63, no. 3 (2010): 710–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40929823.
Dimmock, Matthew. Elizabethan Globalism: England, China and the Rainbow Portrait. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Duchesne, Ricardo. The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Evans, Richard. “Response to Baldwin.” Contemporary European History 20, no. 3 (2011): 367–76. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777311000361
Evans, Richard. “What is European History? Reflections of a Cosmopolitan Islander.” European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 593–605. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265691410375500
Evans, Richard. Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009.
Ghobrial, John-Paul A. “Introduction: Seeing the World Like a Microhistorian.” In “Global History and Microhistory.” ed. John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Past and Present 242, suppl. 14 (2019): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz046.
Ginzburg, Carlo, and Carlo Poni. “Il nome e il come: Scambio ineguale e mercato storiografico.” Quaderni storici 40 (1979): 181–90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43777765.
Goldstone, Jack A. “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 249–84. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3632414.
Goldstone, Jack A. “The Rise of the West – or Not?” Sociological Theory 18, no. 2 (2000): 175–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2751.00094.
Goldstone, Jack A. Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1800. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
Goody, Jack. Renaissances: The One and the Many. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Goody, Jack. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Hanlon, Gregory. Early Modern Italy. A Comprehensive Bibliography of Titles in English and French. 12th ed. 2016. Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/7820421.
Hirschi, Caspar. “Republicans of Letters, Memory Politicians, Global Colonialists: Historians in Recent Histories of Historiography.” Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012): 857–81. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X12000337
Holmes, Catherine, and Naomi Standen, eds. “The Global Middle Ages.” Past and Present 238, suppl. 13 (2018).
Hunt, Lynn. History: Why It Matters. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
Hunt, Lynn. Writing History in the Global Era. New York: Norton, 2014.
Jardine, Lisa, and Jerry Brotton. Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Jardine, Lisa. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Jones, Eric. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Keller, Marcus, and Javier Irigoyen-García. “Introduction: The Dialectics of Early Modern Orientalism.” In The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, edited by Marcus Keller and Javier Irigoyen-García, 1–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46236-7_1.
Lu, Mingjun. The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature: A Globalization and Liberal Cosmopolitan Approach to Donne and Milton. New York: Routledge, 2016.
MacLean, Gerald M., and Nabil Matar. Britain and the Islamic World, 1558–1713. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
MacLean, Gerald. Looking East. English Writing and Ottoman Empire before 1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Martines, Lauro. “The Renaissance and the Birth of Consumer Society.” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1998): 193–203. https://doi.org/10.2307/2901668
Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Global History and Historical Sociology.” In The Prospect of Global History, edited by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz and Chris Wickham, 23–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732259.003.0002.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Rublack, Ulinka, eds. Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Sachsenmaier, Dominic. “World History as Ecumenical History?” Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 465–89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20079449
Said, Edward W. Orientalism, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 1994.
See also Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Starn, Randolph. “The Early Modern Muddle.” Journal of Early Modern History 6, no. 3 (2002): 296–307. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006502X00167
Vitkus, Daniel. “Introduction: Toward a New Globalism in Early Modern Studies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2002): v–viii. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27793742.
Wong, R. Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Most read articles by the same author(s)