Discussion: the futures of global history

Global history has come under attack. It is charged with neglecting national history and the ‘small spaces’ of the past, with being an elite globalist project made irrelevant by the anti-globalist politics of our age, with focusing exclusively on mobile people and things, and with becoming dangerously hegemonic. This article demonstrates that global history is, intertwined with a focus on the nation and the local, on individuals, outsiders, and subalterns, and on small and isolated places. Moreover, global history has directly addressed immobility and resistances to flow, and remains relatively weak in the discipline, versus the persistent dominance everywhere of national history. The article offers a new short history of the rise of the contemporary idiom of global history, and a prospect for a future in which scholars may find, through collaboration, alternatives to the European weights and measures of the past, and to the dominance of Anglophone historians. It argues that we should no more reverse the ‘global turn’ than we should return history’s gaze only to propertied white men. Rather than a retreat from global history, we need it more than ever to fight against myths of imperial and national pasts, which often underpin nationalist populisms

Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power

Frederick Cooper's Citizenship between Nation and Empire: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 is a masterwork on the high politics of the end of the French empire in Africa. His elucidation of the attempts by some African political leaders to find a path out of colonial domination that leads through a global French federal sovereignty, rather than the nation-state, is an important contribution. But was there really in practice “the possibility of dismantling empire … without having to choose between French colonialism and national independence”? There are important reasons why the federal utopias of 1946 had no chance of ever being realized. Central to these was the imperial nation-state of France and the forms of French political, economic, and racial privilege that would remain priorities during and after the moment of decolonization. The path that led to the nation-states of Africa after 1960 was already clear by the late 1940s.</jats:p