Excerpt

International Society as a Historical Subject. Erez Manela, 2020, Paper, "For quite some time now, historians have been venturing well beyond the spatial and methodological enclosures of nation-states that had long defined the modern discipline, writing more history that is variously described as international, transnational, transregional, global, or world history.1 In a certain sense, the recent turn to histories that go beyond a single nation or region is actually a return. After all, the concern with history that transcends national enclosures goes back to the origins of the modern discipline, and Leopold von Ranke himself had written about the need to write a weltgeschichte that would go beyond national boundaries.2 Still, the historical profession, to an unusual extent among the disciplines that study human societies, has long been divided into geographically defined subfields structured around national or regional enclosures. There are compelling methodological reasons for this, not least the emphasis that historians place on the acquisition of language skills and other forms of knowledge specific to a single society or region." Link