History of European Ideas

ISSN: 0191-6599 (Print) 1873-541X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20

The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual

History

Rosario López

To cite this article: Rosario López (2016) The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual
History, History of European Ideas, 42:1, 155-160, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2015.1115250

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 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS, 2016
VOL. 42, NO. 1, 155–160
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1115250

The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History

Rosario López
Institute of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews, UK
Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, Global Intellectual History. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013. 352 pp. £27.50 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780231160483.

If, as the editors of this volume claim, intellectual history has ever ‘lagged behind’ the global turn in
historiography, intellectual historians may have reversed the situation setting the pace for other fields
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instead. Global Intellectual History represents a major effort in this regard, rethinking the goals and
challenges of an intellectual history of the global. The so-called global turn has so far led to a read-
justment of the discipline that problematises what we mean by ‘context’. In other words, it calls into
question our ways of dissecting history into temporal and spatial units of study, or contexts, and to
what extent research in intellectual history can justifiably focus on more conventional local or
national domains disregarding global or international realms. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori,
the editors of this volume, present global intellectual history as a remedy to parochialism in intellec-
tual history, thus joining efforts with other scholars, notably among them David Armitage, in rein-
venting the tasks of intellectual historians.
Much as Global Intellectual History succeeds in rectifying localism and bringing into focus neg-
lected international practices, ideas and imaginaries, the status of global intellectual history as an
independent discipline and its relationship with intellectual history as a close relative still remain
unclear. While the editors acknowledge that the global turn in intellectual history is ‘transformative’
and represents a ‘threshold moment’ in the discipline, Sudipta Kaviraj’s chapter in the same volume
maintains that global intellectual history is a ‘new discipline’ united by ‘at least a vague collective
sense’ (295), while Christopher Hill presents global intellectual history as a ‘nascent discipline’
(134). Overall, the idea of rupture and discontinuity with an antecedent form of intellectual history
permeates this collective volume, and both the general introduction and the different chapters
assume that, by qualifying intellectual history as global, methods and heuristics should be closely
reviewed. A global intellectual history thus redefines the goals and objects of study in an essential
way. To put it differently, reframing conventional spatial boundaries leads to a profound reconfi-
guration of the discipline that requires a careful theoretical study. As the editors argue, the problem
‘is far more one of theory than one of practice’, and therefore the book aims at ‘developing plausible
models of what the subject matter of such historiography ought to be’ (4).
Global Intellectual History constitutes not only one of the first collective efforts to publish in this
emerging field of study, but also a foundational work that seeks to act as a theoretical manifesto for
scholars either working or aiming to contribute to that field. Whether global intellectual history
should emerge as a radically different discipline or instead as the result of a subtler reconfiguration
of intellectual history that can accommodate comparative transnational studies is one of the aspects
that will require more scholarly attention in the future. But as the different chapters that make up this
collective volume present interesting, yet contrasting, responses to this question, the book decisively
contributes to spark the debate.
While the introduction and the concluding section offer the theoretical underpinning of this
work, ten individual chapters form its body and function as illustrations of the possible ‘available
choices’ in the field (4). Individual studies constitute a ‘gallery of alternative models’ which
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 156 R. LÓPEZ

nevertheless does not aim at being an exhaustive survey of the approaches available for global intel-
lectual historians. Totality and exhaustiveness in this catalogue can only be considered a mental
experiment. Still, in maintaining that it showcases different approaches to global intellectual history
the book does more than assemble a selection of studies representative of the discipline. More pre-
cisely, in doing so, it becomes a declaration of principles that normatively prescribes a new research
programme, defining to some extent the contours of global intellectual history. On the one hand, the
book refuses to articulate a single definition of global intellectual history. In adopting a pluralistic
approach, this work is in itself an attempt to challenge such definition. Yet on the other hand, the
fact that the different chapters seek to portray alternative options, methods and perspectives within
global intellectual history suggests that these are examples of a particular, independent field. In other
words, these studies, as far as they can be seen as exemplary cases, seem to outline the diverse aspects
and features of a distinct academic field. From a ‘gallery of alternative models’ it would be therefore
possible to infer at least some of the features, aims and objects of global intellectual history. High-
lighting the main points argued in each chapter, this essay examines and elaborates on such a
description.
The volume begins with Siep Stuurman’s study, which analyses how Herodotus (484–425 BCE),
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Sima Quan (145 or 135–86 BCE) and Ibn Khaldun (1332 CE–1406 CE) conceptualised cultural simi-
larities and differences by exploring the divide between sedentary and nomadic communities. Stuur-
man establishes an analytical typology that describes two ways of thinking about cultural and ethnic
differences. When encountering alien customs it is possible to try to overcome those differences by
highlighting the similarities between both cultures, or rather to concentrate on what is distinctive,
thus stressing the cultural distance between them. The author labels the first argumentative strategy
as ‘common humanity’, and the second one as the ‘anthropological turn’. These labels are not to be
found in the historical records examined, yet they function initially as ‘metaconcepts’ (54), ideal
types or analytical frameworks of comparison. While Stuurman argues that both the notions of
‘common humanity’ and the ‘anthropological turn’ can coexist within a civilisation’s discourse on
foreigners (36), his interpretation of Herodotus, Quan and Khaldun regards them as employing
exclusively the discourse of ‘common humanity’. It is therefore possible to wonder whether the
so-called ‘anthropological turn’ plays any role whatsoever, that is, whether these authors should
only be regarded as illustrating how interactions can transcend cultural differences. Still, the chapter
does offer a novel reinterpretation of Herodotus, Quan and Khaldun, which have usually been
studied in isolation and not from a comparative perspective. Remarkably, even though these authors
write in different contexts and epochs, Stuurman’s proposal involves exploring how they conceptu-
alised the global by looking at the ways they imagined cultural differences. In Stuurman’s proposal
the global emerges only when exploring the way they imagined humanity and it is therefore a meta-
analytical category.
Sheldon Pollock’s chapter examines the magnitude of the Sanskrit cultural and political order and
questions on the one hand the chronology of globalisation as an essentially modern phenomenon,
and on the other hand the lack of precision that characterises studies dealing with earlier processes
of globalisation. Since globalisation is not exclusive to modernity, Pollock argues, it is necessary to
understand earlier translocal political and cultural networks in a way that accounts for the fluidity
and contingent interaction that characterised them. The case in focus is premodern South Asia
which, although underrepresented in academic literature, constitutes an example of what the author
calls quasi-globalisation. Pollock focuses on the development of the Sanskrit language as it leads to
the emergence of a new literary-cultural domain marked by its cosmopolitan character (62). What
makes the Sanskrit language an interesting case study is the fact that it was used by elites to articulate
a political consciousness and culture, being in itself a celebration of ‘aesthetic power’ and a kind of
‘poetry of politics’ that helped create a common space that transcended national contexts (64). As is
illustrated by the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, although Sanskrit never functioned as an
everyday medium of communication, it gave rise to a ‘culture-space’ and a ‘power-space’ that
stood in contraposition to a ‘nation-space’ (67). Aware of the fact that there was not a term used
 HISTORY of EUROPEAN IDEAS 157

at the time to describe this broader space, Pollock uses the expression ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ to des-
ignate a supraregional domain where politics and language are brought into focus. The study, how-
ever, does not problematise whether there is a close correspondence between the notions of
cosmopolis and the global. Overall, the author reinstates the role of language in creating a suprar-
egional identity, thus successfully offering an alternative interpretation to the development of the
Sanskrit language that does not resort to religious factors. Along with the focus on language, this
study gives an account of the role of literature in shaping a transregional culture and the processes
that helped create a new conceptual constellation in premodern South Asia.
The role of intermediaries and networks in making sense of seemingly incommensurable cultures is
also the focus of Vanessa Smith’s contribution. But whereas language is the main feature in Pollock’s
contribution, Smith claims that contemporary intellectual history is biased towards the written record,
thus suggesting a shift from text to artefact. Deprivileging the written archive helps her unravel an
intellectual history of the other in societies with a prominent oral tradition. Her case study is Joseph
Banks (1743–1820), who is considered a cultural intermediary as he travels on board the Endeavour
and comes into contact with indigenous people. This chapter offers an alternative interpretation of
Banks’s extensive intellectual network which is valuable for scholars interested in his work, but it
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also suggests that a global intellectual history should be concerned with the circulation of ideas in a
way that accounts for a plurality of cultural practices, including the contingency of oral communi-
cation, and it should therefore address its inherent Eurocentric, text-centred perspective.
Andrew Sartori focuses on the entangled relationship between political economy and intellectual
history. In this chapter, political economy acts as a lens through which the necessity of incorporating
a global perspective is revealed. More precisely, political economy provides us with a particular kind
of abstraction that is essential to the shift from intellectual history to global intellectual history.
According to Sartori, the global is an essentially modern category that should be understood in con-
nection with the growth of capitalism and the political-economic discourse. Writing from a Marxist
perspective, Sartori contends that the emergence of political economy can only be regarded as the
product of modernity in Europe, reviewing in that way some interpretations that look retrospectively
for precursors of political economy. A special kind of abstraction explains the joint development of
political economy and the global category, since ‘the object for which political economy was devel-
oped –capitalist social relations – simply did not exist as a problematic calling for systematic con-
ceptualization’ (120). Even if the author points out that the category of the global is problematic
in itself, it helps him envisage the aim of global intellectual history as an academic field: ‘to remain
alert to the different modes in which social abstraction might be experienced under different
relationships to capitalist society (including marginalization and exclusion), without losing sight
of the global significance of these abstractions’ (127). Notably, Sartori’s view of the emergence of
the global as tied up with capitalism casts doubts on other studies in this volume, namely Siep Stuur-
man and Sheldon Pollock’s contributions, which do not link globality and modernity.
A further study on the transnational circulation of concepts examines how the European concepts
of ‘civilisation’ and ‘society’ travelled to Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Christopher
L. Hill focuses on the spread of European social and political thought in nineteenth-century
Japan with the aim of suggesting methods for the development of global intellectual history as a ‘nas-
cent discipline’ (134). Making the idea of travel the backbone of his interpretation, Hill argues that
the proper object of a global intellectual history of the nineteenth century is the analysis of how con-
cepts circulated and were reproduced. The question of whether the specificity of his analysis is expor-
table to other periods, contexts and research agendas is not addressed specifically, but this study
provides interesting general insights into the ambiguities and contingencies that affect translations
in an intellectual history that aims at transcending national discourses. Hill points to the fact that
concepts can be used far from their context of origin without having to be de facto universal.
What matters, he claims, is that ‘civilisation’ and ‘society’ were used in nineteenth-century Japan
as if their meaning were similar in different contexts and therefore as valid in any situation. To
put it differently, Hill focuses on the ‘universalization’ rather than on the ‘universality’ of concepts
 158 R. LÓPEZ

(135), thus adopting a perspective in which the use of a concept determines its meaning. As this case
study illustrates, concepts can be used in a variety of contexts to legitimise political reforms and to
reshape social and political practices. Overall, the author offers a timely reflection on the role that
translation plays in the circulation of concepts beyond national borders that contributes to link
the fields of translation studies and intellectual history in line with what authors like Melvin Richter
and Peter Burke, among others, have suggested.1
Cemil Aydin’s study is concerned with both the scope of intellectual history from a global per-
spective and the relationship between international history and the former. As regards the scope
of intellectual history, Aydin argues in favour of a non-Eurocentric global intellectual history. As glo-
balisation and universalist ideas take many forms, one of which is Pan-Islamism, he argues, this
makes a case for expanding the parameters of intellectual history. Upholding the essentially eclectic
character of global intellectual history, Aydin’s perspective challenges the bias towards a precon-
ceived idea of the global and individual agency. In doing so, a richer and pluralistic history of the
idea of the ‘Muslim world’ and Pan-Islamism emerges, which helps us understand that these con-
cepts did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century and only gained widespread currency during
the 1880s. The identity of the ‘Muslim world’, according to Aydin, emerged as ‘common sense
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knowledge, a geo-political reality, and a civilisational-religious identity that everybody agreed on’
(168). While the idea of cultural identity is employed rather uncritically in the study, the emergence
of the ‘Muslim world’ as a transnational space convincingly justifies the crisscrossing of international
history and intellectual history.
Entering into a stimulating dialogue with Sartori’s approach, Samuel Moyn calls into question the
existence of an inner logic in our explanation of the idea of human rights as global concept. Moyn
reminds us that while intellectual history has to explain how concepts were globalised, it should
also account for the ‘nonglobalisation’ of concepts, that is, it needs to provide an explanation for
those cases in which concepts do not make sense in an international realm despite their alleged inter-
national nature. The history of human rights and the Haitian Revolution illustrate the inner logic that
Moyn attempts to dismantle. In the recent historiography of human rights Haiti’s Revolution is fre-
quently considered a step towards the global fulfilment of human rights, a process in which the concept
of human rights was realised in virtue of what it already was: a case of ‘autoglobalization’ (190). Moyn
has described this process elsewhere as a case of looking for ‘a saving truth, discovered rather than
made in history’.2 Instead of tracing ‘the already built-in potential’ of concepts to be globalised,
Moyn suggests that a satisfactory explanation of the rise and decline of ideas has to account for con-
crete and contingent uses of concepts. Controversial as it may sound, Moyn convincingly shows that
human rights were not always universal, thus challenging mainstream scholarly interpretations.
Mamadou Diouf and Jinny Prais also offer a proposal to reshape global intellectual history, this
time to create a more inclusive discipline representative of the variety of universal narratives. By
exploring the writings of black historians W. E. B. DuBois, William Henry Ferris and J. E. Casely
Hayford, this chapter seeks to recompose a global historical narrative and restore Africa’s role in glo-
bal history. While in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade these authors reclaimed Africa’s role in
world history and efficiently engaged with Western intellectual conceptions, Diouf and Prais main-
tain that in contemporary intellectual history ‘the dominant conceptualizations of the Atlantic world
[ … ] have largely ignored and/or dismissed the role of Africa and Africans’ (206). In order to reverse
this trend, this study compellingly explores how DuBois, Ferris and Casely Hayford created an
archive documenting African history, culture, politics, economics and religion. While trying to
make a case for the recognition of political and social rights, they challenged the view of Africa as

1
Melvin Richter, ‘Introduction: Translation, the History of Concepts and the History of Political Thought’, in Why Concepts Matter:
Translating Social and Political Thought, edited by Martin Burke and Melvin Richter (Leiden, 2012), 1–40; Peter Burke, ‘Lost (and
Found) in Translation: A Cultural History of Translators and Translating in Early Modern Europe’, European Review, 15 (2007), 83–
94; Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter
Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2009), 7–38.
2
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 6.
 HISTORY of EUROPEAN IDEAS 159

devoid of agency. The rise and fall of civilisations, they argued, is periodic. History being therefore
cyclical, they thought Africa would rise in the future. In exploring these discourses Diouf and Prais
show that if global intellectual history is to become truly global, it has to include traditionally margin-
alised epistemological frameworks. One of the innovative features of global intellectual history is
then its capacity to explore overlooked discourses and to engage with the alterity.
Stating that ‘a new global intellectual history’ should be concerned with how ideas travel around the
world, Janaki Bakhle explores the writings of Indian anti-colonialist and nationalist Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar (1883–1966) with the aim of rethinking the ‘regional, national, imperial and international
circuits’ (229). Bakhle offers an enriching understanding of the way concepts travel, revising the belief
that ideas migrate exclusively unidirectionally, from Western to non-Western contexts. Moreover,
Savarkar is portrayed as an eclectic intellectual that does not fit into any of the discourses wherein
his thought has been interpreted. Through a reading of his poems, Bakhle challenges contemporary
interpretations of Savarkar as a nationalist, anarchist and fundamentalist. Mixing classical and folk
literature, and national and international levels of discourse, Savarkar ignores the modern divide
between linguistic communities trespassing boundaries and breaking pre-established rules in what
is regarded as ‘simultaneously global and Indian’ discourse (243).
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Duncan Bell’s chapter is a penetrating analysis that bravely questions whether ‘global intellectual
history’ is simply ‘new wine in old bottles’ (256) or instead if there is something significantly different
that sets it apart. Mirroring the spatial re-orientation of the discipline and the way intellectual history
has broadened its focus in the last few decades, the idea of the ‘global’, he argues, has turned into a
legitimising device. Its meaning, however, is far from clear, which is why Bell laments a ‘failure to
adequately conceptualise “the global”’ (254). Distancing itself from other studies included in this
book and with a somewhat critical tone, Bell’s chapter suggests that this new discipline should be
concerned with explaining and interpreting how past historical agents conceptualise and articulate
forms of universality and the meaning of the concept of ‘global’ itself. In this view, global intellectual
history should be an attempt to describe the ways in which we ‘make worlds’ and how ‘human
actions, beliefs, and intentions fabricate the very worlds in which we live’ (262). If that is the case,
in Bell’s view global intellectual history can be practised regardless of the spatial scale that it pursues,
as long as it explores ‘enunciations of universality’ (257) or how people imagined globality. Global
intellectual history means in this account an intellectual history of the concept of the global, thus
begging the question whether we could rightly regard global intellectual history as a new academic
field at all. Overall, Bell’s chapter is an interesting discussion of the future of global intellectual his-
tory, not only because its perspective differs from other chapters in this volume, but also because it
concisely presents a coherent view of the methodological challenges that the so-called global or inter-
national turn entails.
The last two chapters, penned by Frederick Cooper and Sudipta Kaviraj, offer a reflection on the
meanings and prospects of global intellectual history. Although they both serve as epilogues, they
may as well be read as introductory essays. They provide further coherence to the book, underlying
the main themes that run through it. Interestingly, these two concluding chapters inject some degree
of criticism by addressing its shortcomings, in line with the general tone of the volume – a feature
that represents one of its strengths more generally. Even if global intellectual history emerges, according
to Moyn and Sartori, to distance itself from the scope and methods of intellectual history, it shares with
the latter one of its distinctive features, that is, its reflexive character and methodological self-awareness.
As one of the most prominent branches of the history of ideas as it is currently practised, the contours of
intellectual history are incessantly disputed. Whether expressly or tacitly, intellectual history sways
between reasserting its methods and reinventing itself, permanently haunted by competing histories
of intellectual history. Genealogies of intellectual history have thus been a recurrent theme in the litera-
ture.3 In the forty-five years that separate Quentin Skinner’s seminal essay from Rethinking Modern

To mention a few: John Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy, 43 (1968), 85–104; Dominick LaCapra and Steven
3

L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca and London, 1982); Donald R. Kelley, The
 160 R. LÓPEZ

European Intellectual History, one of the most recent collective efforts in this regard, the identity and
methodological distinctiveness of intellectual history have been hotly debated topics.4 Global intellec-
tual history, and this work as its programmatic manifesto, seems to be yet another turn of the screw: a
recent outcome of the self-reflexivity and scholarly unrest that characterises intellectual history.
Both Cooper and Kaviraj note that the studies that constitute this volume present different views
of what global intellectual history is and ought to be as an emerging field. Despite heterogeneous
views, Kaviraj suggests, there is a ‘vague collective sense’ that, as a ‘new discipline’, global intellectual
history is ‘sensible, definable, and worthwhile’ (295). Yet paradoxically, some authors argue within
the same volume for methods and perspectives that, if adopted, would justify the exclusion of other
studies from the field of global intellectual history. In Duncan Bell’s words: ‘Many of the different
intellectual practices travelling under the sign of the “global” are probably better characterized in
other ways’ (272). For instance, Duncan Bell, Christopher Hill and Andrew Sartori are critical of
the fact that globality can appear in a premodern context, which casts doubts on the contributions
by Siep Stuurman and Sheldon Pollock. Furthermore, Frederick Cooper challenges Bell’s conception
of global intellectual history by arguing that it would imply ‘[defining] a field in artificial terms’ (286).
Unlike Bell’s, Cooper’s version of global intellectual history does not exclude the regional, translocal
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or international (as is also the case for most chapters in this book).
This poses the question of whether the ‘global’ is an appropriate category to broaden our under-
standing of intellectual history. We can question this lack of consensus by turning to David Armi-
tage’s view. Armitage has pointed out that although historians have generally moved towards the
‘international, transnational, comparative, and global’ in the last few years, there is no ‘consensus
on how these non-national approaches to history should be distinguished from each other’.5 The ten-
sion between different models of global intellectual history is apparent in this volume, and by no
means is its discussion avoided. The fact that the present study embraces different ideas of the ‘glo-
bal’ accounts for this diversity and lack of consensus. Three different conceptualisations of the global
coexist in this work. In the first place, the global is sometimes seen as a ‘meta-analytical category of
the historian’ (5). In that case the idea of the global is not present in the historical records themselves.
From a privileged position, the historian brings about an enlarged analytical framework, and thus the
global. In the second place, the global is studied as a historical process, and therefore one of the aims
of some contributions is to describe how concepts circulate, are translated, and acquire meaning
beyond local or national realms. Lastly, some studies examine the global as a ‘subjective category’
(5) of the historical agents, and it is in that sense that it becomes possible to describe global intellec-
tual history as an intellectual history of the ‘global’.
It is possible, however, to regard the plurality that informs Global Intellectual History as an advan-
tage. Its inclusiveness allow for the study of a variety of topics and levels of discourse, both in their
written and oral traditions, as regards politics, history, culture, religion, language and political econ-
omy. It also helps us consider traditions other than Western and frameworks beyond the national. In
its ‘soft version’ (283) a global intellectual history thus enriches an Anglo-Saxon, state-focused intel-
lectual history which, studying mainly printed texts, has traditionally tended to interpret them in
terms of their political relevance. This plurality has at least another positive outcome, namely,
that the book can appeal to a variety of audiences. Readers who are interested in the present and
future of intellectual history as an academic discipline will undoubtedly profit from it. Additionally,
scholars of globalisation will find a historical reflection on the meaning of the global, while those
interested in non-Western traditions will be pleased to see that these are brought from the margins
to the centre of the discourse.

Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History, (Burlington, 2002); Anthony T. Grafton, ‘The History of Ideas: Precept and Prac-
tice, 1950–2000 and Beyond’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 76 (2006), 1–32.
4
Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3–53; Darrin M. McMahon and
Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York, 2014).
5
David Armitage, ‘The International Turn in Intellectual History’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York, 2014),
232–33.