Attending to the Meaning of Geographic Space

The recent turn to global perspectives is about more than broadening the geographic base of historical analyses.  The trend challenges longstanding assumptions about the meaning of geographic space, one of the discipline’s foundational categories.  By widening the spatial perspective, global approaches—in all their various forms—promise new conceptual and analytical insights.  Transnational history, in particular, questions the national boundaries that have long defined historical fields and framed analyses within those fields.  Similarly, global history has emphasized dynamics generated outside, rather than within, geographic boundaries of particular places to apprehend and explain change over time.  At issue are larger questions about the history of space:  How has geographic space been conceived of in the past?  How have geographic spaces shaped people’s lives at different historical moments? How do we, as historians, use space in our analyses?  The best scholarship in global and transnational history explores those questions.  Yet, as the global turn has moved through historical fields and acquired more presence in the discipline, it has become more identified with geographical expanse than the analysis of geographic space:  the approach is defined, primarily, in terms of the incorporation of broad swathes of geography into one analysis, rather than the critical engagement in the historical meaning of space.  The results tend create an artificial separation between history with a global reach and other historical approaches.  My talk will focus on the implications, which limit the conceptual implications of the global turn for the discipline of history more generally.