The influential readings contained in this volume combine conceptual history - the history of words and languages - and global history, showing clearly how the two disciplines can benefit from a combined approach. The readings familiarize the reader with conceptual history and its relationship with global history, looking at transfers between nations and languages as well as the ways in which world-views are created and transported through language. Part One: Classical Texts presents the three foundational texts for conceptual history, giving the reader a grasp of the origins of the discipline. Part Two: Challenges focuses on critiques of the approach and explores their ongoing relevance today. Part Three: Translations of Concepts provides examples of conceptual history in practice, via case studies of historical research with a global scope. Finally, the book's concluding essay examines the current state and the future potential of conceptual history. This original introduction provides the students of conceptual, global and intellectual history with a firm grasp of the past trajectories of conceptual history as well as its more recent global and transnational tendencies, and the promises and challenges of writing global history.

In this study, Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in 19th- and 20th-century Bengal to show how the concept of 'culture' can take on a life of its own in different contexts, weaving the narrative of Bengal's embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept.

Contributors to this volume explore the changing concepts of the social and the economic during a period of fundamental change across Asia. They challenge accepted explanations of how Western knowledge spread through Asia and show how versatile Asian intellectuals were in introducing European concepts and in blending them with local traditions.

Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa’s historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like “work,” “marriage,” and “land” take shape.

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.

Today people all over the globe invoke the concept of culture to make sense of their world, their social interactions, and themselves. But how did the culture concept become so ubiquitous? In this ambitious study, Andrew Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal to show how the concept can take on a life of its own in different contexts. Sartori weaves the narrative of Bengal’s embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept, from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany, through its adoption in England in the early 1800s, to its appearance in distinct local guises across the non-Western world. The impetus for the concept’s dissemination was capitalism, Sartori argues, as its spread across the globe initiated the need to celebrate the local and the communal. Therefore, Sartori concludes, the use of the culture concept in non-Western sites was driven not by slavish imitation of colonizing powers, but by the same problems that repeatedly followed the advance of modern capitalism. This remarkable interdisciplinary study will be of significant interest to historians and anthropologists, as well as scholars of South Asia and colonialism.

The result of extensive collaboration among leading scholars from across Europe, Conceptual History in the European Space represents a landmark intervention in the historiography of concepts. It brings together ambitious thematic studies that combine the pioneering methods of historian Reinhart Koselleck with contemporary insights and debates, each one illuminating a key feature of the European conceptual landscape. With clarifying overviews of such contested theoretical terrain as translatability, spatiality, and center-periphery dynamics, it also provides indispensable contextualization for an era of widespread disenchantment with and misunderstanding of the European project.

The first comprehensive overview of the innovative new discipline of global history Until very recently, historians have looked at the past with the tools of the nineteenth century. But globalization has fundamentally altered our ways of knowing, and it is no longer possible to study nations in isolation or to understand world history as emanating from the West. This book reveals why the discipline of global history has emerged as the most dynamic and innovative field in history—one that takes the connectedness of the world as its point of departure, and that poses a fundamental challenge to the premises and methods of history as we know it. What Is Global History? provides a comprehensive overview of this exciting new approach to history. The book addresses some of the biggest questions the discipline will face in the twenty-first century: How does global history differ from other interpretations of world history? How do we write a global history that is not Eurocentric yet does not fall into the trap of creating new centrisms? How can historians compare different societies and establish compatibility across space? What are the politics of global history? This in-depth and accessible book also explores the limits of the new paradigm and even its dangers, the question of whom global history should be written for, and much more. Written by a leading expert in the field, What Is Global History? shows how, by understanding the world's past as an integrated whole, historians can remap the terrain of their discipline for our globalized present.

What is modern psychology and how did it get here? How and why did psychology come to be the world's most popular science? A Conceptual History of Psychology charts the development of psychology from its foundations in ancient philosophy to the dynamic scientific field it is today. Emphasizing psychology's diverse global heritage, the book explains how, across centuries, human beings came to use reason, empiricism, and science to explore each other's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The book skilfully interweaves conceptual and historical issues to illustrate the contemporary relevance of history to the discipline. It shows how changing historical and cultural contexts have shaped the way in which modern psychology conceptualizes individuals, brains, personality, gender, cognition, consciousness, health, childhood, and relationships. This comprehensive textbook: - Helps students understand psychology through its origins, evolution and cultural contexts - Moves beyond a 'great persons and events' narrative to emphasize the development of the theoretical and practical concepts that comprise psychology - Highlights the work of minority and non-Western figures whose influential work is often overlooked in traditional accounts, providing a fuller picture of the field's development - Includes a range of engaging and innovative learning features to help students build and deepen a critical understanding of the subject - Draws on examples from contemporary politics, society and culture that bring key debates and historical milestones to life - Meets the requirements for the Conceptual and Historical Issues component of BPS-accredited Psychology degrees. This textbook will provide students with invaluable insight into the past, present and future of this exciting and vitally important field. Read more from Brian Hughes on his blog at thesciencebit.net

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.