Person:

Armitage, David

El primer ensayo de esta serie analiza aquella protesta provincial —tan frecuente— contra los impuestos de la metrópoli, que se convirtió en guerra civil y, más tarde, en la primera guerra de independencia. David Armitage sitúa este conflicto dentro del Imperio británico atlántico, registrando no sólo a las 13 colonias que se independizaron, sino también a los territorios y pobladores que permanecieron leales a la Corona. Desde esta perspectiva, la experiencia se vuelve comparable con los procesos del Atlántico hispánico, dejando de ser un evento aislado. De esta manera, es posible discutir sobre la influencia global de la gran innovación que fue crear Estados a partir de un Imperio.

Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of intellectual history.

The European discovery of new lands and new peoples in the Americas challenged the visions of world history and of the salvation of the infidel accepted by both Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. The results were a revival of apocalyptic history with the New World at its center, a wide debate about the possibility of the salvation of non-Christian peoples, and the creation of new missionary strategies to effect their conversion, often under the impact of the evangelical success of the Catholic Reformation both in Europe and in America. Catholic and Protestant reformers reached similar conclusions about the New World's place in providential history but diverged sharply in their assessment of the possibility of the natives' salvation, and hence the effort which should be put into their evangelization.

Failure by academic historians to take the long view threatens the future of public history and policy, but a shift is afoot.

Big is back across a wide range of historical fields. Many historians are stretching space, to create international, transnational and global histories. Others are expanding time, to pursue Big History, Deep History and the history of the Anthropocene. What explains this broadening of horizons? And what does it mean for the future of history? This article makes a case for history as a discipline of social and political transformation amid crises of global governance, rising inequality, and anthropogenic climate change.

For most of the life-span of the historical profession, in most parts of the world, historians were committed to methodological nationalism. Like most other social scientists, they assumed that self-identifying nations, organized politically into states, were the primary objects of historical study. Their main tasks were accordingly to narrate how nation-states emerged, how they developed, and how they interacted with one another. Even those historians whose work deliberately crossed the borders of national histories worked along similar lines. For example, diplomatic historians used national archives to reconstruct relations among states. Historians of immigration tracked the arrival and assimilation of new peoples into existing states. And imperial historians studied empires as the extensions of national histories, even though they generally maintained a strict separation between the histories of metropolitan states (mostly in Europe) and their colonies (mostly outside Europe). In all these fields, the matter of history concerned stability not mobility, what was fixed but not what was mixed.

Jeremy Bentham's career as a writer spanned almost seventy years, from the Seven Years' War to the early 1830s, a period contemporaries called an age of revolutions and more recent historians have seen as a world crisis. This article traces Bentham's developing universalism in the context of international conflict across his lifetime and in relation to his attempts to create a 'Universal Jurisprudence'. That ambition went unachieved and his successors turned his conception of international law in a more particularist direction. Going back behind Bentham's legacies to his own writings, both published and unpublished, reveals a thinker responsive to specific events but also committed to a universalist vision that helped to make him a precociously global figure in the history of political thought.