Volume 11, Issue 3 -

There is a boom of art historical studies on the globalisation of the arts or global art world. Sociological accounts are, despite the rise of cultural and art sociology in recent years, almost complete absent from this discussion. This paper makes a contribution to the globalisation of the arts, but from a sociological and quantitative perspective. The focus of this paper is on particular type of global institution – biennials and other types of art festivals or large-scale exhibitions. These institutions are seen being major places of exchange and formulation of norms and standards. They define what is hip and new. However, theories of globalisation, in combination with accounts from professionals of the field, claim that these institutions propagate only Western values or have a homogenising quality, because they only show caste works from artists of the Western hemisphere or that they repeat the same works and artists across the globe. However, based on a large-scale quantitative survey, this paper will demonstrate that picture is more complex and that we find tendencies to homogenisation and heterogenisation existing at the same time or that the locality of these events acts as a source of uniqueness and innovativeness. The paper proposes a new theoretical framework that interprets these findings as based on Niklas Luhmann’s idea of second-order observation and Bruno Latour’s and Harrison C. White’s conception of the network.

This essay considers the similarities and differences between world history, global history, and universal history. It demonstrates how a philosophical, and specifically a teleological, understanding of history is central to the idea of universal history. To a certain extent, this philosophical version of universal history transcends both world history and global history in that some versions of each of those are in fact universal histories of this very kind.

From its beginnings in eighteenth-century revolution through the great global wave of democratizations that began in the 1970s, the term “democracy” has been used in many different ways but always referred to a form of self-rule of a defined people on a defined territory. The very obvious web of transnational interconnection had by the late twentieth century raised important questions about what democracy could mean in the global era. Everyday speech in Greece has for several decades been taking note of this by referring to the President of the United States as the Planetarch, a major figure whom they had no role in selecting. We use interviews from just before the elections of 2008 that brought Barack Obama to office to explore what Greeks mean by this term and conclude by showing that it provides a framework for them to talk about his successor, President Donald Trump, as well.

This article has two goals. It reflects on the recent developments and agenda of an approach to historical writing that is now becoming known by the name global microhistory, and it analyses the attention which this approach pays to individual lives. It also explores some of the challenges in writing the biography of a city alongside the life history of a person. The city is Harbin, a former Russian-managed railway hub in Manchuria, today a province capital in Northeast China. The person is Baron Roger Budberg (1867–1926), a physician of Baltic German origin who arrived in Harbin during the Russo-Japanese war and remained there until his death, leaving published works and unpublished correspondence in German and Russian. My forthcoming book about Budberg and Harbin challenges the distinction between writing “biography”, on the one hand, and “history”, on the other, while navigating between the “micro” and “macro” layers of historical enquiry.

In the United States, students of law, politics and economics are primarily trained to think in terms of state-centric analytical frameworks. This essay argues that this training is anachronistic and does not adequately prepare students for the complex geopolitics of the 21st century. Of course, not all scholarship in these disciplines can be characterized in this way since each discipline has its own internal disputes and scholarly innovations. That being said, a mainstream state-centric approach dominates the literature and the curriculum in most law, politics and economics departments. The first part of the essay describes the rise of law schools and the establishing of political science and economics disciplines in the late 19th century. It explores the implications of these disciplines’ claim to do “scientific” research. It argues that this claim continues to bind the disciplines to a state-centric framework which in turn provides obstacles to developing new theories and methods.