Global History

""Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850-2000, brings together a wide range of case studies from across the globe, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, to explore the complex ways in which historical understandings of childhood and juvenile delinquency have been constructed in a global context. The book highlights the continued entanglement of historical descriptions of the development of juvenile justice systems in other parts of the world with narratives of Western colonialism and the persistence of notions of a cultural divide between East and West. It also stresses the need to combine theoretical insights from traditional comparative history with new global history approaches. In doing so, the case studies examined in the volume reveal the significant limitations to the influence of Western ideas about juvenile delinquency in other parts of the world as well as the important degree to which Western understandings of delinquency were also constructed in a transnational context.
Includes chapters by Stephanie Olsen, Amrit Dev Kaur Khalsa, Howard Lupovitch, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Sarah Bornhorst, Barak Kushner, Gleb Tsipursky, Nina Mackert, Kate Bradley and Nina Cicek."""

This article questions a prevailing bipolarity of traditional Cold War History by examining commonalities and interactions between the Soviet Union and Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. After outlining the common characteristics of both states around 1960, it analyses the cultural diplomacy of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union towards Brazil. Transforming its hitherto prevailing image as the cradle of world revolution and communist class struggle, the USSR now represented itself as a role model for the quick industrialisation of the economy and education of the masses. Many Brazilian intellectuals and political reformers from Presidents Kubitschek to Goulart shared with the Soviets an interest in what is called here Socialist High Modernity. Contacts with the Soviet Union were a chief reason for the putsch and the end of Brazilian democracy in 1964. But the new military leaders also had their own interests in and surprisingly good relations with the stagnating Soviet Union – again based on a set of commonalities in the historical development of the two ostensibly idiosyncratic and distant states on either side of the Iron Curtain. Eschewing teleological interpretations of the period and exploring the ideational basis of actors in the conflict, this shared history – based on new documents from Moscow archives and recently declassified sources from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry – aims to contribute not only to Cold War historiography, but also to link it to the debates on Global History, which have lately neglected both Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Reflection on African consumer interests promises to enrich our understanding of Africa’s position within emerging global hierarchies. Specifically, attention to African cultures of consumption before colonial rule can sharpen our understanding of why--by what social and cultural rationales--Africans engaged in regional and global exchanges that sowed social strife, adversely affected local ecologies, and gave rise to slave-plantation complexes in East and West Africa. While Africa’s global trade relationships created few opportunities for long-term capital accumulation on the continent, the consumer goods acquired through them were vital to position, belonging, and authority in most African societies. At the same time, the consumer demands of Africans shaped global economic relationships well into the colonial era, sometimes in ways that colonial administrations could not easily control.

The spatial framework of the ecclesiastical province of the Archbishop of Sulṭāniyya (established in 1318)  in 1329/1333 i (red: Papal residences) (digital base map: © Google Earth 2012); from: J. Preiser-Kapeller, Civitas Thauris. The significance of Tabrīz in the spatial frameworks of Christian merchants and ecclesiastics in the 13th and 14th century, in: J.  PFEIFFER (ed.), Beyond the Abbasid Caliphate: Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th-15th Century Tabriz. Oxford 2013 [in press].