The Historiography of Continents and Macro-Regions: Traditions, Trajectories, and Problems

In addition to nation states, continents and other macro-regions have long played a rather important role in the conceptual world of modern historiography. For example, there are significant traditions of grasping South Asia, the Islamic World, or Sub-Saharan Africa as distinct historical entities. In an initial step, the paper will apply some global historical perspectives on the spread of macro-regional historiography. The main part of the paper will focus on the historiography of “Europe” and “East Asia” as two sample cases. In the case of Europe, an increasing number of historians seek to abandon nation-centered visions of the past in favor of European perspectives. In many prominent cases, there is a certain tendency to portray Europe as a largely autochthonous historical experience. The paper will discuss in what regards the current project of “Europeanizing history” can be understood as a continuation of earlier civilizational histories of the continent. As a contrast to the European case, the presentation will shed some light on the much more marginal tradition of distinctively “East Asian” histories. The paper will outline some of the commonalities and differences, in which historians in East Asia and Europe have tried to sketch out these regions as distinct historical units. It will pay particular attention to the ways, in which new (and some older) regional histories have been related to other parts of the world. Furthermore, the paper will reflect upon the reasons why “East Asia” has always remained a particularly contested historiographical category in Korea, China, and Japan. In this context, political and institutional factors will be considered, and they will be compared with the situation in Europe. In a final step, the paper discusses alternatives to monadic conceptions of macro-regional histories. It presents some recent approaches that put great emphasis on worldwide entanglements and trans-continental exchanges.