BUILDING TIES WITH EAST ASIA

The University of California's Pacific Rim Program awarded Dominic Sachsenmaier $12,750 for his research on theories of global history in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He will use most of the money to build up a research team at Fudan University in Shanghai and to travel to the region two to three times over the next twelve months.

An extensive literature search and interviews with scholars and public intellectuals will contribute to Sachsenmaier's assessment of the current debates on global history in each of the "Three Chinas." He is particularly interested in the way mental maps, regional identities as well as notions of modernity and globalization influence searches for global perspectives on history. The project will result in several publications, and it will feed into Sachsenmaier's book on "Paths to Global History. Approaches in the United States, Germany and Greater China."

ESTABLISHING A US-GERMAN RESEARCH NETWORK

The German National Research Foundation awarded Dominic Sachsenmaier and Sebastian Conrad (assistant professor at the Free University of Berlin) $90,000 to build up a trans-Atlantic research network in the field of global history. The network will study conceptions of world order between the age of high imperialism (ca 1880) and the dusk of World War II. The group will cover rivaling schools of thought and ideologies such as socialism, liberalism or the spectrum of conservative notions. During the late 19th-century many universalizing visions of world order such as socialism or anarchism spread quickly around the globe, albeit in locally specific versions. However, many visions were countered and challenged by concepts of world order based on different cultural positions outside of Europe and the United States. For example, one central approach within this discourse of world orders was to pose alternative modernities and alternative universalisms as strategies to decenter the globalizing process. Surprisingly, these and other visions of how to the world should be structured, ordered and governed were shared by opinions camps that could range from Japan to the Middle East and the West. The network is particularly interested in the trans-cultural flows of certain ideas and their political support structures. It will explore how certain conceptions of world order were articulated and politically organized in different local contexts. Furthermore, the network will tackle some challenging questions such as the emergence of forms of global consciousness and the impact of the information revolution.

Together Sachsenmaier and Conrad invited nine young scholars who are working in the field and are experts in different world regions, even though they all share a common interest in global history. Much of the research will be conducted as team work. The network will convene five times over a period of three years. The first meeting took place in Berlin in June and the second one will be held in Santa Barbara in early March 2005. During the Santa Barbara meeting the group will finalize its first joint book, which will mainly focus on non-Western experiences.

back to top