Global History and New Polycentric Approaches

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Rethinking the ways global history is envisioned and conceptualized in diverse countries such as China, Japan, Mexico or Spain, this collections considers how global issues are connected with our local and national communities. It examines how the discipline had evolved in various historiographies, from Anglo Saxon to southern European, and its emergence in Asia with the rapid development of the Chinese economy motivation to legitimate the current uniqueness of the history and economy of the nation. It contributes to the revitalization of the field of global history in Chinese historiography, which have been dominated by national narratives and promotes a debate to open new venues in which important features such as scholarly mobility, diversity and internationalization are firmly rooted, putting aside national specificities. Dealing with new approaches on the use of empirical data by framingthe proper questions and hypotheses and connecting western and eastern sources, this text opens a new forum of discussion on how global history has penetrated in western and eastern historiographies, moving the pivotal axis of analysis from national perspectives to open new venues of global history.

Manuel Perez Garcia is tenured Associate Professor at the Department of History, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He obtained his PhD at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). He has been awarded with an ERC (European Research Council)-Starting Grant, Horizon 2020 to conduct the GECEM project - 679371 (Global Encounters between China and Europe) www.gecem.eu. He is founder and director of the Global History Network (GHN) in China www.globalhistorynetwork.com, Distinguished Professor by the University Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain), European host institution of GECEM. He was research fellow at UCBerkeley, Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) in 2011, and visiting professor at UNAM (Mexico) and University of Macerata (Italy). Among his publications stands out Vicarious Consumers, published in 2013. Lucio De Sousa is Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Japan). He obtained in Ph.D. course in Asian Studies at University of Oporto (Oporto, Portugal). He is member of the steering committee of Global History Network. He was a Post Doctoral Fellow at European University Institute (Florence, Italy); and Research Associate at Historiographical Institute (-----), University of Tokyo, Department of Foreign Materials. He was a book winner by the Macao Foundation, the Social Science in China Press and the GuangDong Social Sciences Association (2013), the Portuguese Academy of History and the Gulbenkian Foundation Award (2019).
His primary field of research is the slave trade and Jewish Diaspora in Asia in the Early Modern Period.

PART I Escaping from National Narratives:The New Global History in China and Japan.- Global History, the Role of Scientific Discovery and the 'Needham Question': Europe and China 16th to 19th Centuries.- Encounter and Co-existence: Portugal and Ming China 1511-1610 - Rethinking the Dynamics of a Century of Global-Local Relations.- Challenging National Narratives: On the Origins of Sweet Potato in China as Global Commodity during the Early Modern Period.- Economic Depression and the Silver Question in Nineteenth-Century China.- Kaiiki-shi and World/Global History: A Japanese Perspective.- PART II Trade Networks and Maritime Expansion in East Asian Studies.- Structure and Transformation of the Ming Tribute Trade System.- Nanban Trade and Shuinsen Trade in 16th and 17th Century Japan.- The Jewish Presence in China and Japan in the Early Modern Period: A Social Representation.- Quantifying Ocean Currents as Story Models: Global Oceanic Currents and their Way into Global Navigation.- PART III Circulation of Technology and Commodities in the Atlantic and Pacific.- Global History and the History of Consumption: Congruence and Divergence.- Mexican Cochineal, Local Technologies and the Rise of Global Trade (16th-19th centuries).- Social Networks and the Circulation of Technology and Knowledge in the Global Spanish Empire.- Global Commodities in Early Modern Spain.- Big History as a Commodity at Chinese Universities: A Study in Circulation.