Entanglements, Political Communication, and Shared Temporal Layers

Abstract

Encounters and entanglements are at the core of global historians’ work at three levels. Firstly, unlike specialists of regional or national histories, global historians are dependent on collaborative investigations that bring together scholars from different fields, who are likely to have different regional and linguistic skills, often coming from different academic traditions. This requires organizing communication in a way that overcomes historical power cleavages between regions, or at the very least refuses to reinforce them. Secondly, encounters and entanglements are at the core of the problems that interest global historians and which they endeavor to understand and endow with meaning, whether explicitly or implicitly through the analytical concepts and categories they use. If goods and ideas move and actors encounter one another, this raises the question of how such entities communicate across linguistic and regional differences. Thirdly, therefore, global historians need to attend to the ways in which historical actors simultaneously provide the raw material of encounters and related communication—and furnish their own interpretation, which structures the encounter. All three levels come together in the writing of global history. In this article we aim to show how historical actors referred to an earlier textual tradition, and thereby interpreted and created possibilities for transcultural political communication. We argue that these strategies and interpretations form part of the historical encounter, and need to be acknowledged by historians in order to understand how communication works.