How Do You Know When You Are Doing World History?

This historiographical roundtable seeks to bring together a set of distinguished scholars for a critical exploration of the current state of historiography in the field of 'World History'. In recent years there has been an exponential growth in literature dedicated to the study of human societies on the largest canvas, especially through study of long term and widespread transformations in domains such as agriculture, demography, disease and consumption. Many of these approaches contend, as they must, with the singular history of a world dominated and molded by the expansion of Europe along with capitalism, science and technology, and plural histories of the world that can only be gained through extra-European perspectives. This panel is designed to stimulate a discussion that goes beyond the usual binaries of world history such as western/non-western, modern/ premodern, capitalist/precapitalist, anticipating newer forms of macro and micro histories that challenge the spatial and temporal foundations on which such binaries rest. By exploring in some depth both chronology and the dynamics of human mobility, we hope to move the discussion toward more genuinely universal modes of discussing large-scale change.