Since the 1970s West German historiography has been one of the main arenas of international comparative history. It has produced important empirical studies particularly in social history as well as methodological and theoretical reflections on comparative history. During the last twenty years however, this approach has felt pressure from two sources: cultural historical approaches, which stress microhistory and the construction of cultural transfer on the one hand, global history and transnational approaches with emphasis on connected history on the other. This volume introduces the reader to some of the major methodological debates and to recent empirical research of German historians, who do comparative and transnational work.
Cuprins
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Comparison and beyond: Traditions, scope and perspective of comparative history
Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt
PART I: COMPARATIVE AND ENTANGLED HISTORY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
Chapter 1. The debate between comparison and transfers – and what now?
Hartmut Kaelble
Chapter 2. A ‘Transnational’ History of Society: Continuity or New Departure
Jürgen Osterhammel
Chapter 3. Double Marginalization: A plea for a transnational perspective on German history
Sebastian Conrad
Chapter 4. Entangled histories of uneven modernities: Civil society, caste councils and legal pluralism in postcolonial India
Shalini Randeria
Chapter 5. Lost in translation? Transcending boundaries in comparative history
M. Juneja and M. Pernau
PART II: TRANSNATIONALIZATION AND ISSUES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
Chapter 6. The Nation as a Developing Resource Community: A Generalizing Comparison
Dieter Langewiesche
Chapter 7. Birds of a Feather: A Comparative History of German and U.S. Labour in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Thomas Welskopp
Chapter 8. Common challenges, common solutions? Visions of the future during the 1960s. GDR, CSSR and the Federal Republic of Germany in comparative perspective
Jörg Requate
Chapter 9. Comparisons, Cultural Transfers and the Study of Networks: Towards a Transnational History of Europe
Philipp Ther
Chapter 10. Germany and Africa in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: An Entangled History?
Andreas Eckert
Chapter 11. Losing National Identity or Gaining Transcultural Competence: Changing Approaches in Migration History
Dirk Hoerder
Notes on Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
Despre autor
Jürgen Kocka is currently Professor for the History of the Industrial World at the Free University of Berlin, Research Professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin and, regularly, a Visiting Professor at the University of California Los Angeles. Between 1973 and 1988 he taught in the University of Bielefeld. He has published widely in the field of modern history of Europe. His publications in the English language include Facing Total War. German Society 1914-1918 (Berg, 1984) and Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society. Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (Berghahn, 1999).