Global Histories: Connections and Circulations in Historical International Relations

The chapter provides an overview of Global History as a field within history and identifies its relevance for International Relations (IR). To this end, the chapter identifies three main, and yet distinct approaches to Global History. We reconstruct scholarship conceptualising Global History as (1) a hermeneutic device for extending the analytical scale of history through space; (2) as history of globalisation understood as an integrative process over time; and (3) an approach that prioritises entanglements, connections, circulations and exchange as units of investigation from a historical perspective. We argue that a broader conception of Global History, which subsumes a sensibility to entanglements, offers a way out of reproducing the two birth defects in history writing – methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism – in historical research in international studies. The chapter concludes by outlining how concerns of Global History have recently entered IR.