RTG 2248: Global Intellectual History – Transfers, Circulation of Ideas, Historical Actors (18th-20th century)

When writing the global history of the modern world (17th -20th century), one crucial aim is to explain processes of intellectual entanglement, and the transregional and cross-cultural transfer of concepts and ideas. While in the realms of the international state system, the global economy, and infrastructure and communications policies, the establishment of global standards has been well documented, the emergence of shared ideas, concepts, norms, and ideologies was a multifaceted and highly complex process. What factors brought it about? Who contributed to their development? Which ideas were able to cross borders and under which conditions? A global historical approach should allow for a more complete understanding of a global history of ideas and concepts, as well as their respective roles in processes of global integration.To this end, the proposed graduate school aims to explore the field of global intellectual history. Such an approach to intellectual history, still very much in the making, differentiates itself from more diffusionist historiographies. Instead, a global intellectual history approach places non-Western actors and their agency in the foreground, thereby helping illuminate the complexities of transfer and entanglement processes. Institutionally (and methodologically), the graduate school’s approach rests on the cooperation of the fields of history and area studies. For the field of intellectual history, until now dominated by overwhelmingly Eurocentric scholarship, such collaboration promises innovative results.The aims of the proposed graduate school are three-fold: First, we will explore the intellectual reactions to processes of entanglement, and thus study the trans-border spread of ideas, claims to universal validity, as well as counter-movements to such claims. Second, we intend to give special attention to the role of actors and their agency. Third, the proposed graduate school will contribute to methodological discussions in the field of global intellectual history.An additional unique aspect of the program is its integration with the activities of the Global History Collaborative, including its international summer schools. This will allow for doctoral students to not only research global history, but also to enter into and profit from a transcontinental dialogue with alternative perspectives on global history.