Introduction: For a Global Historical Sociology

Why Global Historical Sociology? Would it be an exaggeration to claim that there has been a “global” revolution in the social sciences? Witness, in disciplinary history, the rise of “global history” and “transnational history.” Ever since Akira Iriye’s (1989) call for historians “to search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries,” historians have institutionalized transnational history as a prominent subfield, one that can be seen in journals, books, conferences, course offerings, and job lines. Witness, too, the proliferation of “globalization” studies (e.g., Castells 1996; Held et al. 1999; Beck 2006; Beck 2012) and the attempt to institutionalize a “global sociology” (Burawoy 2000; Burawoy 2008), moves intended to explore new cosmopolitan identities and trace social processes at transnational and global scales (also see Wallerstein 2001). Consider finally the discipline of International Relations (IR). For much of its disciplinary history, IR has studied the workings of a small part of the world (the West) through a relatively sparse analytical lens (the “states under anarchy” problematique). In recent years, IR scholarship has begun to make clear the ways in which the emergence of the discipline was intimately associated with issues of colonial management (e.g., Vitalis 2010, 2016), the diverse range of polities that constitute the international system (e.g., Phillips and Sharman 2015), and the myriad of social forces, from market exchanges to cultural flows, that make up “the international” (e.g., Hobson, Lawson and Rosenberg 2010). The academy’s most overtly “international” discipline is finally going “global” (Tickner and Blaney eds. 2012). The essays in this collection join and advance this revolution. But they do so from a particular standpoint: “Global Historical Sociology” (GHS). By “Global Historical Sociology” we mean the study of two interrelated dynamics: first, the transnational and global dynamics that enable the emergence, reproduction, and breakdown of social orders whether these orders are situated at the subnational, national, or global scales; and second, the historical emergence, reproduction, and breakdown of transnational and global social forms. The first of these dynamics provides the “global” in our enquiry; the second constitutes the “historical sociology.” While historical sociology is a long-established interdisciplinary field concerned with incorporating temporality in the analysis of social processes, we conceive global historical sociology as the study of the transnational and global features of these processes.