Eurocentrism and Global Intellectual History

The inaugural Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference took place on May 31, 2024, under the theme ‘Methodologies in Intellectual History’. The third panel on ‘Global Intellectual History’ (GIH) confronted the issue of Eurocentrism in the recent ‘global turn’ among intellectual historians. The panellists expressed a common concern over Eurocentrism in global approaches and presented methods that counter it.

Efforts to counter nation-centric, state-centric, and Eurocentric narratives have given rise to ‘international’, ‘global’, ‘comparative’, and ‘transnational’ perspectives in history. However, the ‘international turn’ often narrates history through the imagination of an international world order built on Western modernity and the extension of nation-state apparatuses onto the globe. Although the ‘global turn’ decentres nation-states, if historians such as Andrew Sartori and John Dunn continue to understand the term ‘global’ as inseparable from capitalist modernity and political economy, GIH may once again lead to the obfuscation of non-Eurocentric currents that challenged, operated outside of, or even subverted Western modernity.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s book review of the edited volume, Global Intellectual History, points out that its observations remain largely guided by Hegel and Marx, that nine out of thirteen authors are from New York, that periods before 1800 are neglected, and that the thematic focus on political thought and economy left out many other themes, including global issues par excellence such as the environment. Samuel Moyn and Sartori, editors of the volume, are not afraid to point out that much of global history remains Eurocentric. However, even their suggestion to investigate the ‘reception’ and ‘reappropriation’ of concepts from the West to the non-West (c.f. p.16, as a response to David Armitage’s book, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History) retains a Eurocentric focus insofar as it becomes another diffusionist ‘influence study’ of the peripheral Rest dealing with the centred West.

The method of looking at the transportation of ideas from the West to the non-West was challenged by our first online speaker, Kaoruko Kawashima, a DPhil candidate at Oxford. Her presentation on the non-Eurocentric history of human rights in nineteenth-century Japan undermined the narrative that human rights in this period originated from an importation of ‘universal’ Western values. Going beyond mere ‘influence studies’ of ‘reappropriation’ or ‘reception’, her approach centred conceptions of rights in local thought in Japan and how that underpinned translations of Western concepts of human rights. Her revelations problematised the narrative that human rights were of Western origin across the globe.

As pointed out in J. G. A. Pocock’s 2019 article, ‘On the Unglobality of Contexts’, transnational and cross-cultural encounters, whether they be of people, ideas, things, and so on, give rise to the issue of (in)commensurability. The next speaker, Ross Moncrieff – a DPhil candidate at All Souls College, Oxford – presented on the issue of global incommensurability, which he viewed as an issue of intellectual history in general. In other words, it arises whenever historians look at a time and place alien to their own. In the context of GIH, however, how can we understand cross-cultural and transnational exchanges without employing Eurocentric interpretive frameworks? Moncrieff drew insight from Henry Rosemont Jr.’s concept of ‘homoversalism’ to argue that focussing on the biological human parameters that all people have in common can function as a starting point for comparison. He proposed that careful comparative approaches can aid our understanding of cross-cultural exchanges without reinvoking the Eurocentric perspectives that GIH aims to challenge in the first place.

Our final speaker, Jorge Varela-Yepes, a PhD candidate at UCL, presented on political thought in nineteenth-century Latin America through transnational and comparative lenses. He argued that views of Latin America as ‘autocratic’ obscure democratic currents in the area and prevent such histories from being written in the first place. He employed transnational and comparative approaches to highlight the importance of regional dynamics in Latin America and its production of alternative political modernities, which remain provincialised by GIH’s focus on the influences of North American or European thinkers on Latin American thinkers.

How does the distinction between transnational, comparative, and global fit into this challenge against Eurocentric GIH? Notwithstanding their commonalities, chapter 3 of Sebastian Conrad’s What is Global History? identified a trend among historians who employ transnational and/or comparative approaches in contrast to global approaches. Similarly, Varela-Yepes’ focus on transnational dynamics reflected a scepticism towards global histories that obscure them and remain focused on Western origins. However, Moncrieff defended the potential of comparative methods to achieve a transnational GIH that is non-Eurocentric and commensurable, and Kawashima’s challenge against Eurocentrism left open possibilities for a non-Eurocentric GIH that investigates transnational encounters through local knowledges. Nevertheless, all the panellists presented methodological avenues for future research that challenge existing Eurocentric historiography.

In my view, if GIH aims to avoid rehashing imperial history, its centralisation of the West and peripheralization of the Rest requires revision—not only in terms of reversing or ridding the binary between the centre and periphery but also in questioning the playing field of global encounters. If ‘global’ is understood as inseparable from modern ‘globalisation’, transnational encounters will remain primarily concerned with issues of empire, capitalism, international apparatuses, and engagement with or reappropriation of ideas deriving from Western modernity. Under such histories, ‘dissenters’ risk being narrated primarily as negators of global currents (e.g., anti-nationalist, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist, and so forth)—a perspective that decentres their own transregional imaginations and actions and reinvokes the primacy of what they aim to critique. In the wake of ‘multiple’ and ‘alternative’ modernities (but in particular Sho Konishi’s variation of Anarchist Modernity that is distinguishable from both), perhaps we may also reopen the ‘global’ or adopt a different term so that the histories of imaginations, actions, exchanges, and relations that challenged, subverted, evaded, uprooted, or lay outside of Western modernity are not foreclosed or decentred from the outset by how the ‘global’ is framed.

Toma-Jin Morikawa-Fouquet chaired the ‘Global Intellectual History’ panel at the 2024 Oxford Centre for Intellectual History Graduate Conference. He is a DPhil candidate in History at the University of Oxford.