Stuck between the West and the Global

In this incisive Long Read, Ferenc Laczó critically engages with Globalizing Europe, edited by David Motadel (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Laczó highlights the volume’s intellectual ambition and scholarly range, while probing its limitations— particularly a lack of a sustained effort to engage with the rich and growing global historical scholarship that meaningfully incorporates areas outside of the northwestern “core.” 

The rise of global approaches presents huge opportunities to explore modern Europe as part of a globalizing world and to globalize European history.  By now, such approaches have affected and helped renew nearly every field relevant to the historical study of Europe. However, that wide-ranging though uneven transformation arguably remains rather poorly understood in its details. This calls for succinct thematic overviews by distinguished historians that explore and assess the impact of the “global turn” on a host of fields. 

Collecting such overviews of key areas such as political, economic, intellectual, gender, migration or environmental history is precisely what makes Globalizing Europe such a valuable though not unproblematic collection. In my assessment, this handy volume features numerous thoughtful and substantial overviews, yet without challenging the uneven global distribution of interpretive power or at least taking into proper account Europe’s internal diversity. But before I come to reflect on the larger stakes of the volume and attempt an evaluation, let me offer brief summaries of its most striking contents.

In accordance with the volume’s overarching agenda, the introduction by Motadel provides a broad historiographical overview of how historians of Europe have responded to the “global turn” – without intending to reflect more directly on key arguments made in subsequent chapters. The volume’s editor rightly notes that Europe’s global entanglements have long remained marginalized in national histories and that European continental history has “traditionally been no more open” (p. 4). Overall, Motadel diagnoses a growing, although still fragmented literature on how Europe has historically been an arena of transcontinental interaction that has been a recipient of outside influences as much as a force transforming the world (p. 21).

The collection features several contributions of the highest calibre. J. R. McNeill’s impressive chapter begins with a crisp overview of Europe’s distinctive environmental features to then summarize in masterly fashion – and with primary foci on the early modern centuries and first centuries of the industrial era – Europe’s history of biological exchanges and its imperial environmental history, industrial environmental history, and intellectual environmental history. Maxine Berg’s chapter on the history of consumption stands out with its richness and precision too. It sends a reminder that researchers can still do much more to dissect the intimate connection between the reception of goods and raw materials in Europe and the history of slavery, especially in the Americas. Berg’s contribution also proposes the stark argument that imported manufactured goods not only had a wide impact on material culture and consumer demand in Europe but also stimulated adaptive and inventive products and technologies which eventually led to the Industrial Revolution (p. 113).

I find Sebastian Conrad’s critical reflections on political history similarly refined and inspiring. Conrad’s chapter suggests, perhaps most crucially and in agreement with Gurminder K. Bhambra, that the global should be understood as the condition of the modern world, not its consequence (p. 40). New initiatives in political history and the history of political power demonstrate accordingly that crucial watersheds of European history have been part of larger configurations and constituted responses to global challenges (p. 31). Even as historians of Europe would be well advised to draw more on Conrad’s point that Europe’s unity was to a considerable degree made from without (p. 35), his more theoretical proposal to move analyses beyond the dichotomy of internal and external strikes me as rather too ambitious (p. 40). 

Samuel Moyn’s contribution on European intellectual history in a global age – almost unavoidably – sounds more defensive. As the author immediately admits, European intellectual history was “never really cosmopolitan” (p. 57).  In his familiar mode of inventive polemic, Moyn goes on to present four current approaches through which this field may nonetheless thrive after the global turn. He discusses the recovery of global contexts and sources; the capturing of past global imaginations; the complex reception and remaking of concepts and traditions; and – perhaps more controversially – how European thinkers can still be significant in understanding global relations, not least as their thought continues to inform our ideologies of emancipation.

Stephen W. Sawyer’s reflective piece constitutes a highly useful addition to the collection. The author notes how certain structures, technologies, and modes of globalization of the post-Cold War world fuelled the recent round of global history. Sawyer thereby also makes his reader consider how, with powerful backlashes against recently still predominant forms of globalization, the context of global history writing may be changing dramatically. His efforts at historical contextualization also suggest a vast research agenda focused on how various scales have been constructed over time and how the different perceptions of, and often contradictory reactions to, globalization have evolved (p. 270).

Abigail Green’s erudite commentary on the history of religions amounts to another outstanding contribution – and indirectly points to certain weaknesses in the volume’s conception (more on them below). Green asks how the historiography of Europe can be integrated with the historiographies of Europe’s historic non-Christian populations, specifically Jews and Muslims. Her chapter shows that such a critical exercise can help us rethink the very concept of Europe and the interface between the European and the global. I consider hers a splendid contribution that lives up to the promise of writing history against the grain.

Numerous further chapters provide convincing analyses, but perhaps fewer surprising insights. Sven Beckert is certainly correct to underline that Europe’s economic development during the past half a millennium was the result of the labour, inventiveness, ecological resources, and capital of people from all continents, and the creation of a connected yet hierarchical world economy was at the very core of Europe’s economic ascendancy (p. 43). It is indicative of the substantial, fruitful integration of economic history with global approaches in recent years that such a conclusion now strikes one as utterly conventional. Caroline van Eck discusses in a comparably competent manner the renewal of global art history now conceived as a history of the mobility of objects that have created transcultural practices across parts of the world connected through the rise of global commercial empires (p. 224). 

As Elizabeth Buettler adds, global history had already been, albeit to varying degrees, quite integral to migration history – and the “global turn” has thus amounted to less than a revolutionary transformation in her specific field. In his deflationary afterword, Richard Evans similarly speaks of global history as more of an addition to rather than a substitute of pre-existing historiography (p. 278). 

European and global history were never meant to contradict each other, of course. The rationale for integrating European history into global history may seem obvious too: as Richard Drayton usefully puts it on these pages, the colonizer and the colonized, the European and the extra-European were in a “dynamic relationship of reciprocal influence” and European history should be viewed as eminently comparable (p. 77). 

What then are some of the main stakes of this wide-ranging and erudite volume? Three large questions appear to me quite crucial: how profound a transformation in our professional study of European history has the “global turn” implied? How are historians addressing previous, often drastic – and consistent – patterns of marginalization or even neglect in the writing of European history, and how to overcome those patterns more effectively in the future? Third, how should we conceptualize “Europe” and “the global” in the light of that transformation and that ambition? 

Regarding the first question, the overall impression the volume conveys is just how much depends on the specific field. Beckert, for example, speaks of economic history as “perhaps more thoroughly globalized than any other within the discipline” (pp. 46-7). To take an even sharper example: Anne Gerritsen argues that the distinction between what is European and what is non-European is “impossible to maintain” when we think about material culture (p. 133). 

I would locate Richard Drayton’s piece on social history – which pleads for a “postcolonial European social history that is genuinely pan-European” (p. 84) – closer to the other end of the spectrum as this agenda is still to be realized. When it comes to military history, Michelle Moyd even speaks of “persistent divides” (p. 251). In her assessment, the “global turn” has done little to shift the parameters within her field: the history of European colonial warfare and the military history of “other parts of the world” more generally still only feature peripherally in European military history. 

The most critical contribution in this regard that directly addresses the second large stake as well, i.e. patterns of marginalization or even neglect, is, however, Priya Satia’s. Satia argues forcefully that histories of race and racism remain persistently marginalized in European historiography, including in much of the current volume (p. 159). She also notes that “new trends” in the writing of global history may in fact do little more than rehash the counternarratives of earlier “nonwhite anti-colonial thinkers” without properly acknowledging them (p. 178). While the focus of Satia’s chapter on the most harmful traditions of white supremacy may strike some readers as too singular, it is indeed remarkable just how little recognition the long tradition of writing about Europe from the “outside in” receives on these pages. 

Moyd may explicitly plead for challenging the radically uneven distribution of interpretive power (p. 252), but I must admit I remain unconvinced that Globalizing Europe represents a conscious step in that direction. It seems to me that with all volume contributors being based in the UK, the US or major West European urban centres such as Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin, that “radically uneven distribution of interpretive power” may even be reinforced. 

The point seems critically important to me. After all, this erudite volume is meant to be about reshaping the boundaries of modern Europe and the field of modern European history. Its contributors laudably plead for a deeper consciousness of different spatial layers that would allow historians to properly consider both Europe’s “internal diversity and external relations,” as Motadel puts it (p. 23). It is remarkable then just how often Europe gets reduced to its northwestern parts on these pages. 

There are some important nuances in this regard. As mentioned earlier, Green does much to display alternatives to essentialist notions of Europe. Lucy Delap also does more than most to foreground scholarship on east, central and southeast Europe when it comes to her subject, the history of feminism (pp. 196-7), while Drayton explicitly raises the possibility of placing the east of Europe at the centre of future social history research (p. 84). Still, I have found relatively few examples on these pages of sustained engagements with the rich and growing global historical scholarship that meaningfully incorporates areas outside the northwestern “core.” This is especially regrettable since arguably no border of Europe has been more porous than its imaginary, and recurrently reinvented, Eastern one. 

While the agenda of provincializing Europe may well be inseparable from deprovincializing Western Europe, Globalizing Europe: A History decentres Europe in the world just as it recurrently recentres northwestern Europe within Europe. It therefore seems to me that any ambitious future attempt at reconceptualizing the relationship between “Europe” and “the global” – stake number three – will not only need to respond to the central, post-colonial challenge but also consider Europe’s own internal heterogeneity much more thoroughly. In this important respect, this substantial, illuminating and often inspiring volume unfortunately qualifies as a missed opportunity.