On the Origins of Global History

How does one think of history on a world scale? Should one turn to the intellectuals of the past or the historians of the present? Universal history as it was practised from Antiquity started to change from the sixteenth century in varied contexts, from East Asia to Spanish America. Applying his extensive knowledge of archives across the world and his command of languages and historiographic traditions of Asia, Europe and the Americas, Sanjay Subrahmanyam considers the history of networks and exchanges of goods, myths and ideologies from a new perspective. He works outside traditional geopolitical frameworks based on the nation-state model, to present global history as a field defined and redefined by “connected histories”.