Global Intellectual History

Where do ideas fit into historical accounts that take an expansive, global view of human movements and events? Teaching scholars of intellectual history to incorporate transnational perspectives into their work, while also recommending how to confront the challenges and controversies that may arise, this original resource explains the concepts, concerns, practice, and promise of "global intellectual history," featuring essays by leading scholars on various approaches that are taking shape across the discipline.

The contributors to Global Intellectual History explore the different ways in which one can think about the production, dissemination, and circulation of "global" ideas and ask whether global intellectual history can indeed produce legitimate narratives. They discuss how intellectuals and ideas fit within current conceptions of global frames and processes of globalization and proto-globalization, and they distinguish between ideas of the global and those of the transnational, identifying what each contributes to intellectual history. A crucial guide, this collection sets conceptual coordinates for readers eager to map an emerging area of study.

Samuel Moyn is a professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is the editor of Pierre Rosanvallon's Democracy Past and Future and the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.

Andrew Sartori is associate professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital and the coeditor of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition.

As intellectual history takes a global turn, the field urgently needs inspiring examples and salutary skepticism. Global Intellectual History provides both in equal measure through multiple models drawn from exceptionally broad expanses of both time and space. The result is a milestone, a collection of the first importance for global historians and intellectual historians alike.

Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge, author of The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions, and Judgement in Modern Political Thought:

Conceptually and substantively sophisticated, this volume of essays will be widely welcomed by a variety of historians. The field is a burgeoning one, but there is little to shape it collectively at present. This volume is among the first to focus on the comparative merits of global intellectual history.