Das Harvard Magazine beschäftigt sich in seiner aktuellen Ausgabe mit den veränderten Perspektiven der Geschichtswissenschaft.
Global history is “the kind of idea that, once you have it, is impossible to go back from,” Beckert continues. “You can’t. It’s going to be with you forever because it’s just a different way of seeing history.” While it opens new questions, it “also opens up totally new understandings of particular historical problems such as the problem of slavery. You understand, on a global scale, that the global problem, from the perspective of European colonialists and European entrepreneurs, is really how to transform the countryside. The resulting transformation takes different forms in different parts of the world, but sometimes it’s also quite similar. After the Civil War, for example, sharecropping becomes dominant in the United States, but it’s also important in Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, and other parts of the world. People in these places learn from one another. They observe one another.”