Narratives, Nations, and Other World Products in the Making of Global History

by Jeremy Adelman (Editor), Andreas Eckert (Editor)

Overview

Explaining how nations and narratives have been the products of transnational, cross-border forces of migration and cultural exchange, this open access volume presents a global history of the basic ideas that govern our understanding of the modern world and highlight the power of narratives in world history.

From the Enlightenment forward, the nation and other global concepts have been conjured and repurposed to manage and make sense of what we now call globalisation. The authors in this volume show how social categories such as empire, race and labour were the centerpiece subjects of collective narratives.

For the past two centuries, the practices of shared storytelling aimed to make sense of how groups like nations fit in the wider world. This volume explores how they created bonding narratives for co-members of these groups and bridging stories to explain how groups should relate to each other through trade, war, peace, and other worldmaking processes.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Princeton University, USA.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350441019
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/19/2026
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Adelman is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University, USA. He has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, as well as recognitions for his pioneering teaching at Princeton. Chair of the Princeton History Department for the last four years, he is also the founder of the Council for International Teaching and Research.

Andreas Eckert is Chair of African History at Humboldt University, Germany.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Maps, Illustrations and Tables
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: A World of Narratives, Jeremy Adelman & Andreas Eckert (Princeton University, USA, and Humboldt University, Germany)

Section I: Stories of Peoplehood
1. "This Nation is a Globe": Narratives of Global Integration in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Matthew Karp (Princeton University, USA)
2. Three Chinese Politicians': National Narratives of Global Integration and Their Influences on History Writing in China, Maohong Bao (Fudan University, China)
3. Going Beyond the "Western Impact" Narrative: China as a World Power, 1850-1950, Xavier Paulès (EHESS Paris France)
4. Fighting 'the warfare of peacetime': Japan's Quest for National Narratives during the Late Nineteenth Century, Mayuko Sano (Kyoto University, Japan)
5. Toyo (the East) and Asia: The Transition of Japanese Self-Consciousness from the 1850s to the 1940s, Haneda Masashi (University of Tokyo, Japan)
6. Decolonization Narratives - Indonesia in the Global World, 1920s - 1960s, Vincent Houben (Humboldt University, Germany)
7. Applying Global History to the Study of War: Transnational Narratives of Resilience under Aerial Bombardment, Sheldon Garon (Princeton University, USA)

Section II: Empires and Other Great Powers
8. Renegotiating the Soviet Union: Soviet Central Asian Elites and Decolonization, 1950s-1970s, Marc Elie (EHESS Paris, France)
9. The Boomerang of Imperial Sovereignty: Bosnia-Herzegovina in the Eye of the World Storm, Natasha Wheatley (Princeton University, USA)
10. A Century of Convergences: Contested Concepts of Economic Integration, 1919-2019, Jeremy Adelman, Abigail Kret, Marlène Rosano-Grange, and Bruno Settis (Princeton University, USA, and Sciences Po, Paris, France)
11. Narrating Progress: Developmental Regimes in Semi- and Anti-Colonial Southeast Asia, Benjamin Baumann, Vincent Houben, Disha Jani (Humboldt University, Germany, and Princeton University, USA)

Section III: Other World Products
12. Narrating Global Order: Stories about and around the United Nations, Pierre-Yves Cadalen, Connor Mills and Karoline Postel Vinay (Sciences Po, Paris, France)
13. Global Narratives of “the Immigrant”, Megan Armknecht, Markus Bierkoch, and Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton University, USA, and Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
14. Global Integration, Social Disintegration: Edward Long's History Jamaica (1774), Silvia Sebastiani (EHESS Paris, France)
15. Demanding Publics: Struggles over the Meaning of Work in Late Colonial East and West Africa, Fabian Krautwald, Kerstin Stubenvoll and Andreas Eckert (Binghamton University, USA and Humboldt University, Germany)
16. Narrating Backwardness and the Russian Case, Alessandro Stanziani (EHESS Paris, France)
17. Discovering the Periphery, Jeremy Adelman, Laetitia Lenel, and Pablo Pryluka (Princeton University, USA, and Humboldt University, Germany)

Coda: Narratives in an Embattled World, Dominic Sachsenmaier (University of Göttingen, Germany)

Bibliography
Notes