How and in what ways did the Spatial Turn contribute to the historiography of globalisation?

How and in what ways did the Spatial Turn contribute to the historiography of globalisation?

“History is set not only in time but also in space.”¹ With these words, Karl Schlögel begins his introduction to his book in which he impressively attempts to sharpen the awareness of the spatial perception of the various worldly dimensions. In this context, historical events take place in specific places that serve as “settings”. For example, the names of cities can be symbolic of entire epochs or empires. The metaphors we use to talk about history cannot do without the use of space.² Mostly, however, historiography records the course of temporal events in a chronicle. This temporal perspective is often unconsciously accepted as a kind of irrefutable law. As a result, the absence of the spatial dimension in historiography is not particularly noticeable.

The experiences of acceleration and globalisation could also be responsible for the “disappearance” of space as a category. The fact that the world and its dimensions are shrinking and that everything is, in a sense, merging and disappearing into one another through a constant acceleration of events, has given rise to the misunderstanding that space has lost its meaning.³ Especially in globalisation research, therefore, the urgency of the new concept of space became apparent. With events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the vulnerability of physical space emerged as a kind of “master narrative”.⁴ From then on, globalisation was no longer just the global networking of goods and knowledge but also revealed a more profoundly expanded field in which not only physical space plays a role. However, this requires the right scaling in the form of the right “altitude”, or rather the right spatial framework. Jürgen Osterhammel, one of the most influential global historians from Germany, puts it in a nutshell with his question: “How high ‘into the air’ do you have to rise to gain which overview?”⁵ He describes this as undoubtedly one of the most important methodological questions that historians must also address. These questions were answered by the Spatial Turn, which was launched by several human geographers at the end of the twentieth century. This ensured that historical scholarship, too, became more concerned with space as an analytical tool of historiography – especially for understanding globalisation.

This essay will take a closer look at this contribution. In particular, it will explore the question of how and in what ways the Spatial Turn did contribute to the historiography of globalisation. Therefore, the paper first deals with a view on the background of globalisation studies in history and explain the traditional approach which was prevailed in historical science for a long time. Second, the essay focuses on the new approach of the so-called “Spatial Turn” and sheds light on the importance of space and spatial relations for the understanding of social, cultural, and political phenomena. The third chapter deals with the contribution of the Spatial Turn to globalisation studies in history. Fourthly, the essay briefly reviews critiques of the post-spatial-turn approaches and evaluates the extent to which scholars have drawn new insights from them. In conclusion, the final chapter draws upon the entire topic and summarises the discussed points.

To understand the influence of the Spatial Turn on the historiography of globalisation, it is first useful to look back at the development of this sub-field of historical studies.⁶ For a long time, the dogma in historical scholarship was primarily national history. This changed, however, when new academic currents emerged in the 1970s, especially from countries with a long imperial past, which wrote transnational history by looking at the relations between countries. Nevertheless, the nation-state as a categorical entity was often still tacitly assumed.⁷ With the advent of transnational historiography, the Eurocentric worldview that had prevailed until then also had to be put into perspective for many historians. The study of the new phenomenon of globalisation also played a role in this.

The term globalisation emerged in the 1960s and gained widespread popularity in the 1990s, bringing new terminology such as networks, flows, circulations, transfers, and mobilities to describe transnational phenomena. The turn to space in cultural studies focused attention on territories, landscapes, places, distances, and borders.⁸ Originally, the term globalisation was used mainly in social sciences to describe the new economic contexts of the late twentieth century, such as trade markets, financial transactions, international corporate activities, and labor migration. The new framework was now soon seen as a useful tool for describing political, technological, sociocultural, and environmental changes of global proportions.⁹ However, historians initially overlooked globalisation, primarily focusing on local, national, or regional history. Despite this, some world historians have addressed globalisation, and there has been a call to confront its historiography.¹⁰

However, the historiography of globalisation has also brought difficulties. In his book “What is Global History?”, Sebastian Conrad cites three critical problems associated with the historiography of globalisation. Firstly, he accuses it of streamlining the history of globalisation and focusing predominantly on the single criterion of interdependence, with the result that the multiple courses and effects of past developments are neglected.¹¹ The second problem he sees is the “myth of continuity”. By this, he means that long-term developments are often traced, with the statement that later events followed naturally from earlier ones. Such path dependencies are often a fallacy since long-term developments did not necessarily follow a straight line and build on each other.¹² As a third point, he mentions the problem that the search for the origins of globalisation presupposes that the connections have a certain starting point – but this is not the case:

Trade and market exchange, patterns of migration, the expansion of communication, the spread of ideas, the trajectory of social conflicts, the aspirations of empires and religious communities – these and many other processes follow their own chronologies and their diverse turning points, which will only rarely map onto each other neatly.¹³

It can be said that the term globalisation often obscures the fact that the contexts and global processes were diverse and multi-layered and followed different, sometimes incompatible logics. To unite them all under the unifying label of “globalisation” leads to the heterogeneity of the processes sometimes being obscured.¹⁴

Midell argues that the problem lies in the multiplicity of competing spatial frames.¹⁵ Patterns of cultural exchange and transnational spaces cannot be summed up in a single fixed category of space, and the traditional notion of space as a container¹⁶ in which historical change takes place narrows the view to the intertwined processes of global integration. By this, he means the dialectic of flows – for example, of migration, capital, commodities, and ideas – as well as the attempt to integrate them through various forms of territorialisation such as nation-states, regions, cities as portals of globalisation¹⁷, supranational structures, identity politics or transnational networks. In addition, the conceptions of these spaces also change over time, which means that no uniform spatial unit can be defined for all periods in the past. From this, he concludes that especially methodological nationalism is not only flawed but also unhistorical.¹⁸ Alongside methodological nationalism, Eurocentrism stands as another point of criticism of Global History.¹⁹ This is sometimes related to postcolonial legacies and Western narratives, which are not so easy to discard. In a way, globalisation research was stuck and needed a change.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, many of the traditional concepts of spatiality as well as the relationships between space and territory described in the previous part have been outdated. Many scholars from different disciplines have questioned the established understanding of space as well as the assumption of a postmodern, spaceless world and have instead argued for the continued existence but changed the meaning of spatiality. This rethinking was commonly referred to as the “Spatial Turn”. In the 1990s, the new concept gained widespread acceptance in the various sciences, although historians, among others, were among the laggards.²⁰ The concept assumes that there is a multiplicity of competing spatial frames at any given time. This means that certain patterns cannot be grouped into a single fixed spatial category, as has been done in the “container logic” so far.²¹ In contrast, the Spatial Turn recognises the construction of spaces, the simultaneity of different spatial frameworks, and the central role of actors in spaces. Methodological nationalism or any form of centrism, which had already been seen as problematic, is rejected.²²

The human geographer Edward Soja was a key figure in the development of a new approach to a new view of space. He shaped the approach in particular through his Thirdspace concept. According to this, “there is not one definition for this other way of thinking about space and spatiality, but an infinite number of perspectives.” With the Spatial Turn came an increasingly strong awareness of the simultaneity and interlocking complexity of the social, the historical, and the spatial. Soja calls this new perspective an “Ontological Turn”.²³ This is no longer just about historicity and sociality per se, but also about relations between society and its spatial constitution (so-called Thirding).²⁴ Soja argues that, of course, experts such as historians, geographers, and sociologists, each look more closely at one of the three dimensions. However, he states that if they were to exclude the other two, they would run the risk of omitting essential principles of the constitution of human life and “instead fall into the limited ways of looking at historical, social or spatial-geographical determinisms.”²⁵ The human geographer builds on Henri Lefebvre²⁶, who distinguishes between a perceived space (for Soja, Firstspace) and a conceived space (Secondspace).²⁷ Perceived space refers to the world of direct, immediate spatial experience, which can also be represented cartographically. Conceived space, on the other hand, refers to mental space, which is primarily concerned with conceptual and ideological discourses in the history of ideas. It is concerned, for example, with the level of social strata and human participation in them. With Thirdspace, Soja complements lived space. This is what he calls “critical thirding-as-othering”.²⁸

Spatial components, such as landscapes with hills and valleys or even rivers and seas, were originally considered natural frameworks and inflexible determinants of man-made history.²⁹ In the new understanding of space, however, space is no longer seen as a purely natural phenomenon, but rather as an integral part of society. Spaces are thus based on an active practice of interaction and perception by the subjects and are themselves actors in the determination of social structures. As an “act of synthesis”, processes of perception, imagination, and memory can take place in spaces and new spaces can be constituted from them. Through social interaction and the constitution of spaces, these spaces were not perceived as “natural” determinants, which is why they are open to sociological and historical analysis.³⁰

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¹ Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans. by Gerrit Jackson (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016), p. xvii.

² Schlögel, In Space, p. xvii.

³ Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Spaces, Places, and the Historians: A Comment from a German Perspective’, History and Theory, 52.3 (2013), 420-432 (p. 422).

⁴ Schwerhoff, ‘Spaces, Places’, p. 422.

⁵ Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Flughöhe der Adler. Historische Essays zur Globalen Gegenwart (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 2017), p. 7.

⁶ For a more in-depth look at the history of globalisation, see Jürgen Osterhammel, and Niels P. Petersson, Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen, 6th Edition (München: Verlag C.H.Beck, 2019).

⁷ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Transnationale Geschichte – der neue Königsweg historischer Forschung?’, in Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. by Gunilla Budde (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 161-174 (p. 162), Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 3.

⁸ Osterhammel, Die Flughöhe, pp. 20-21.

⁹ Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell and Kerry Ward, ‘Global History and Globalization’, in The New World History. A Field Guide for Teachers and Researchers, ed. by Ross E. Dunn, Laura J. Mitchell, and Kerry Ward (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), pp. 475-531 (p. 476).

¹⁰ Dunn, ‘Global History’, pp. 476-477.

¹¹ Conrad, What Is Global History?, p. 99.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid., p. 100.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Matthias Midell and Katja Naumann, ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization’, Journal of Global History, 5 (2015), 149-170 (p. 155).

¹⁶ See also Schwerhoff, ‘Spaces, Places’, p. 425.

¹⁷ See Midell, ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn’, p. 153, 162.

¹⁸ Midell, ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn’, p. 155.

¹⁹ Hagen Schulz-Forsberg, ‘The Spatial and Temporal Layers of Global History: A Reflection on Global Conceptual History through Expanding Reinhart Koselleck’s “Zeitschichten” into Global Spaces’, Historical Social Research, 38.3 (2013), 40-58 (p. 48), see also Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation. Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1.

²⁰ Midell, ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn’, p. 154.

²¹ Ibid., p. 155.

²² Midell, ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn’, p. 155.

²³ Soja, ‘Thirdspace – Die Erweiterung des Geographischen Blicks’, p. 270.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 271.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 272.

²⁶ See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991).

²⁷ Soja, ‘Thirdspace – Die Erweiterung des Geographischen Blicks’, p. 274.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 277.

²⁹ Schwerhoff, ‘Spaces, Places’, p. 425.

³⁰ Schwerhoff, ‘Spaces, Places’, p. 425.