Centre, Periphery and Back European Historiographical Itineraries

HTML PDF
Published: Jun 27, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/historein.41308
Keywords:
Historiography European history Global history Centre Periphery
Athena Syriatou
Democritus University of Thrace
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9826-7859
Abstract

This special issue consists of a collection of six articles by Greek historians of the periphery of Europe that look at the perplexities and challenges of European historiography of the centre. Their analysis aims to interpret pivotal moments that have shaped recent historiographies in tackling the advance of global history, and the successful or unsuccessful ways in which world histories have rearranged notions of nation, empire and interconnectedness through economy and culture. They seek not to write a different history than a native historian would, especially as academic connectedness and informed research is the aim of every historian in any case, but to express how, in their opinion, ruptures in dominant convictions and essentialised ideas function in historiographical terms today. A common thread in these essays is that, despite the expansion of methodologies and globalised historiographical endeavours, the nation persists in many recent historical works as a constant, essential unit in the historical profession. In that sense, even when the peripheries enrich historical research, they rarely produce holistic works or independent theoretical frameworks.

Article Details
  • Section
  • INTRODUCTION
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
Athena Syriatou, Democritus University of Thrace

Dr. Athena Syriatou is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary European History in the History and Ethnology Department, Democritus University of Thrace in Greece. She studied English Literature and History at the University of Athens (B.A.) and British and European history at the University College London (UK). She received her Ph.D., from the University College London (1997). She has taught European and British History at the University College London (UK), the University of Crete, the University of Athens and the Hellenic Open University. She has published articles and chapters in books on issues concerning the formation of national and social identity through formal education, on issues concerning the uses of memory and public history, especially in twentieth-century Britain. She has also written a textbook on the History of European Education from 6th to the 20th century for the Hellenic Open University and participated as a writer of textbooks of European history for secondary schools. Her research interests include social and cultural British history, history of nationalism as well as public history and the history of memory.

References
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.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Cole, Laurence, and Philipp Ther. “Introduction: Current Challenges of Writing European History.” European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 581-92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265691410377159.
Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Dialla, Ada. Η Ρωσική Αυτοκρατορία και ο ελληνικός κόσμος: Τοπικές, ευρωπαϊκές και παγκόσμιες ιστορίες στην Εποχή των Επαναστάσεων [The Russian Empire and the Greek world: Local, European and global histories in the Age of Revolutions]. Athens: Alexandria, 2023.
Duroselle, Jean Baptiste. Europe: A History of its Peoples. London: Viking, 1991.
Evans, Richard. Cosmopolitan Islanders, British Historians and the European Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Evans, Richard. “Global Histories of Modern Europe.” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (English Edition) (2022): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/ahsse.2022.12.
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.
Fabian, Johannes. Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Gani, Jasmine K., and Rabea M. Khan. “Positionality Statements as a Function of Coloniality: Interrogating Reflexive Methodologies.” International Studies Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae038.
Hauswedell, Tessa, Axel Körner, and Ulrich Tiedau, eds. Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery Asymmetrical Encounters in European and Global Contexts. London: UCL Press, 2019.
Isabella, Mauricio. Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.
Jadallah, Christopher C. “Positionality, Relationality, Place, and Land: Considerations for Ethical Research with Communities.” Qualitative Research 25, no. 1 (2025): 227–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941241246174.
Mishkova, Diana. Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Motadel, David. “Global Europe.” In Globalising Europe: A History, ed. David Motadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Sakai, Naoki. “Positions and Positionalities: After Two Decades,” Positions 20, no. 1 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1471385.
Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. London: Allen Lane, 2014.
Venturi, Franco. The End of the Old Regime, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. R.B. Litchfield. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Semi-Peripheral Countries and the Contemporary World Crisis.” Theory and Society 3, no. 4 (1976): 461–83.
Werner, Michael. “Décentrer l’histoire européenne par les marges: Visions plurielles d’une modernité fragmentée.” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 76, no. 4 (2021): 669–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/ahss.2021.159.
Yip, Sun Yee. “Positionality and Reflexivity: Negotiating Insider-Outsider Positions Within and Across Cultures.” International Journal of Research & Method in Education 47, no. 3 (2024): 222–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2023.2266375.
Most read articles by the same author(s)