The following is an excerpt taken from the introduction of a book on World History. Here the editors/authors informed the readers the approach they have taken in their book. In our course we have reflected on different approaches regarding world history. Explain, which approach/approaches authors have taken in their book. Please, explain how you understood.
The following is an excerpt taken from the introduction of a book on World History. Here the editors/authors informed the readers the approach they have taken in their book. In our course we have reflected on different approaches regarding world history. Explain, which approach/approaches authors have taken in their book. Please, explain how you understood.
"…We draw inspiration from Karl Marx’s famous observation that people, ‘make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’… Our approach is to ask students to imagine a world history narrative in which agitators, rebels, strikers, insurgents and unorthodox visionaries of all kinds are at the center— and, in the process, to think about history-making itself as a potentially revolutionary task across a broad range of actors, decades and polities. Those folks were radical not simply because they were rising up form below or striking at the root of power, but because they were more than mobile—literally, on the move. That rootlessness energy made them cosmopolitan in their repertories and ready to appropriate forms and images across a range of movements and causes, as the global circulation of the French revolutionary Phrygian cap testifies. In order to capture the fast-moving character of these histories, and their irreverence for national boundaries, each chapter [of this book] follows the broad chronology of the mid-eighteenth century to the contemporary moment thematically so that we can appreciate the interconnections between them and the specific timelines of each globalizing form, whether revolution or religion or Anthropocene itself. Bringing a variety of thematic approaches to the problem of world histories from the wretched into conversation offers productive possibilities, presenting students of the global opportunity to explore the various spaces and unstable terrains in which the struggles over the nature of modern life have played."
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