Analysing social change has too often been characterized by parochialism, either a Eurocentrism that projects European experience outwards or a disciplinary narrowness that ignores insights from other academic disciplines. This book moves beyond these limits to develop a global perspective on social change.
The book provincializes Europe in order to analyse European modernity as the product of global developments and brings together renowned scholars from international relations, history and sociology in the search for common understandings. In so doing, it provides a range of promising theoretical approaches, analytical takes and substantive research areas that offer new vistas for understanding change on a global scale.
Introduction: World Society and Its Histories: The Sociology and Global
History of Global Social Change ~ Mathias Albert and Tobias Werron
Every Epoch, Time Frame or Date that Is Solid Melts into Air. Does It? The
Entanglements of Global History and World Society ~ Mathias Albert
Periodization in Global History: The Productive Power of Comparing ~ Angelika
Epple
Communication, Diff erentiation and the Evolution of World Society ~ Boris
Holzer
Field Theory and Global Transformations in the Long Twentieth Century ~
Julian Go
Organization(s) of the World ~ Martin Koch
Particularly Universal Encounters: Ethnographic Explorations into a
Laboratory of World Society ~ Teresa Koloma Beck
From the First Sino-Roman War (That Never Happened) to Modern
International-cum-Imperial Relations: Observing International Politics from
an
Evolution Theory Perspective ~ Stephan Stetter
Nationalism as a Global Institution. A Historical-Sociological View ~ Tobias
Werron
States and Markets: A Global Historical Sociology of Capitalist Governance ~
George Lawson
The Impact of Communications in Global History ~ Heidi Tworek
The Long Twentieth Century and the Making of World Trade Law ~ James
Stafford
Third-Party Actors, Transparency and Global Military Affairs ~ Thomas Müller
Technical Internationalism and Global Social Change: A Critical Look at the
Historiography of the United Nations ~ Daniel Speich Chassé
Mathias Albert is Professor of Political Science at Bielefeld University.
Tobias Werron is Professor of Sociological Theory at Bielefeld University.
