Global Religious History

Abstract

Understandings of religion have been fundamentally transformed since the nineteenth century. The respective contradictions, ambiguities, continuities, and ruptures can be most comprehensively grasped when viewed against the background of global entanglements. For this purpose, the approach of global religious history proposes a range of theoretical and methodological tools. Its theoretical repertoire is largely informed by a critical engagement with poststructuralist epistemology and postcolonial perspectives embedded in a consistent genealogical approach. At the outset, it aims at bridging divisions, including those between postcolonial and global history, between disciplines such as religious studies and history, as well as between different area studies. This implies a theoretically robust reflexion of the question of what global entanglements mean in global religious history, along with the question of how to distinguish global religious history from approaches usually qualified by the prefix trans as, for example, in “transregional.” In this introduction, we offer an in-depth discussion of the theoretical foundations and methodological implications of global religious history.