Every three years ENIUGH organizes the European Congress in World and Global History. Since the inaugural congress in 2005 it has developed into an outstanding meeting place for scholars in the fast developing fields of world, global and transnational history and the adjacent disciplines. The number of participants has increased steadily, and the success of the congress can be explained, among other factors, by its openness both to young and experienced scholars alike. It has become a forum for researchers to present and discuss their latest findings as well as to inform each other about new organisational patterns in the fields of teaching and research. It offers information and expertise on undergraduate and graduate teaching as well as PhD-programmes and provides the opportunity to develop emerging research agendas in transnational teams and to get the latest news about European and various national funding schemes.
The third congress will take place 14 to 17 April 2011, in London, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which has been among the pioneering institutions in research, teaching and journal-publication in global history.
The congress theme of ‘Comparisons and Connections’ is meant to be both generic and specific. It is intended to be generic enough to attract participants from all the overlapping approaches which share a commitment to transcend national historiographies, whether under such headings as (to give only an incomplete list) ‘world’ or ‘global’ history, ‘transnational’ history, or histoire croisée. To judge from the nearly ninety panels accepted for the congress, this aim has been achieved. The theme is also specific, in that ‘comparisons and connections’ encapsulates a (broad) agenda shared by many scholars around the world concerned with global or transnational history.
The range of themes will focus on different themes, include the entanglements between polities, societies, communities and individuals situated in, or spanning, different regions of the world, the interactions between humanity and the environ¬ment, including those which developed over the very long term, through the cultural and economic histories of material and social life, the histories of empires, large-scale crises, interna¬tional organisations, and the intercontinental sources and consequences of revolutions, whether political, technological, the social or ideological exchanges on oceans as spaces of sustained interaction between communities from different continents, the experience and the consequences of migration, and the description of the periods of de-globalisation and globalisation.
The congress will be opened by two keynote lectures:
Prof. Maxine Berg (University of Warwick): Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge 1600–1800
Prof. Michel Espagne (CNRS, Paris): Global History and the Conceptualisation of Cultural Transfers
A further feature will be the roundtable on ‘Empires and colonies’ on Friday evening, hosted by the German Historical Institute. Three outstanding scholars in the field – Frederick Cooper (New York University), John Darwin (University of Oxford), Regina Grafe (Northwestern University) – will discuss various, possibly contradicting approaches to imperial and colonial history, chaired by Peer Vries (University of Vienna).