Cornelius Torp

Conceptualising transnational spaces in history

Although often considered to be the most recent trend in our discipline, the debate on ‘history beyond the nation-state’ has been going for at least three decades. Nevertheless, the claim could hardly be made that this trend has resulted in the development of broadly shared and methodologically operationalised new concepts of space in historical research. One of the primary reasons for this unsatisfactory state can be found in the fact rather than there being just one debate on transnational history there are several only partially overlapping ones, each with its own specific challenges, academic and political, and agendas. Early on, critiques of the still dominant ‘national paradigm’ in historiography were closely tied to the methodological self-modernisation of the academic discipline of history itself, which owed its very existence, and certainly its lasting institutionalisation, to the rise of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth century. For this reason, the vast majority of European historians seemed to take for granted that the nation-state was the obvious and ‘natural’ object of historical research, and proved to be both unwilling and incapable of putting national phenomena into a broader perspective. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, critics of the national paradigm such as Jacques Le Goff advocated a ‘European’ perspective on history. Consequently, two new fields of research developed. The first was comparative European history (understood as comparisons between the trajectories of different national societies), which was propagated as a remedy to national parochialism and which resulted in a significant number of pioneering empirical studies. The second was ‘cross-border’ history, which explored relationships that influenced the trajectories of national histories, such as migration, the flow of capital, goods and ideas, shared experiences of economic change, social crises or wars, and international politics. One of the first systematic works on the methodology of ‘Beziehungsgeschichte’ (the history of transnational relations) was an article by Klaus Zernack published in 1976. In subsequent years, the concept of ‘Beziehungsgeschichte’ was further developed under the labels of ‘transfer history’ and, in methodological terms more convincingly, as ‘histoire croisée’. Whereas cross-national comparative history did not necessarily challenge the ‘container space’ of the nation-state fundamentally because national entities were compared and national differences highlighted, the new focus on movements and relationships across borders clearly marked a step toward the exploration of uncharted spaces, thus transcending the deeply rooted territorial approach. Undoubtedly, the discussion on European history as an alternative to national history which took place among historians in the 1970s and 1980s was very much fuelled by contemporary political debates on both European integration and détente in East–West

The 'coalition of 'rye and iron'' under the pressure of globalization: a reinterpretation of Germany's political economy before 1914

There has been a good deal of scholarly work on the history of the political economy of the German Empire. This is particularly true for the history of customs and trade policy, which historians identified quite early as a central arena of political conflicts and disputes and to which historians quite often assigned a key role in their competing interpretations of the history of the German Empire.

Economic Crises and Global Politics in the 20th Century

This book analyses the history of economic crises from the angle of international politics and its transformation throughout the 20th century. While political and economic debates in the wake of the present financial crisis are revolving around the question of how to create effective forms of global governance, historians have discovered a long tradition of international economic regulation that can be traced back to the late 19th century. In the global economy, sovereign defaults, banking crises and currency crashes have been recurrent phenomena. At the same time, alongside the growing globalization of commodity and capital markets, nation-states have introduced new forms of regulation both on the national and international level. The experience of economic crises has been an important driver behind numerous initiatives to foster global politics. The purpose of the book is to reconnect economic history with the perspectives of political economy and the history of international relations. It forms a dialogue between the disciplines that have been increasingly separated throughout the past decades. With first-rate economic historians and political economists writing for a wider audience, it simultaneously makes public debates and methods of recent cutting-edge research in economic history within a wider academic community. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Demographic Aging as a Challenge to Modern Societies

This books aims to explore the challenges and the consequences of demographic aging. Population aging is not a new phenomenon. All highly developed countries, and particularly those in Europe, experienced a process of demographic aging throughout the entire twentieth century, a process that is ongoing. While in 1900 only 5 percent of the British population was 65 and over, this increased to 10.8 percent by 1950 and 15.8 percent by 2000; the share of the older population is expected to rise as high as 24.7 percent by 2050 (Phillipson, 2013, p. 12; United Nations, 2012). In Japan, where the demographic aging process over recent decades has been faster than anywhere else, people aged 65 and over now make up a quarter of the population; estimates made by the United Nations Population Division for 2050 add up to 36.5 percent. Even in the United States, whose population by Western standards is relatively young, the proportion of old people is expected to climb from 12.4 percent in 2000 to 21.4 percent in 2050 (United Nations, 2012). Other measures of population aging confirm the picture. The European median age, which divides the population into a younger and an older part of equal size, has risen from 28.9 in 1950 to 40.3 in 2010 (United Nations, 2012). At the same time, an increasing proportion of the elderly now survive into their eighties and nineties, and even become centenarians.

In the wake of crisis: bringing economic history back in

The hour of crisis is the hour of history. In the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2007/8, the ensuing deep recession and the recent European debt and currency crisis, economists and politicians have increasingly looked backwards in order to find orientation and advice. In the public debate, past economic crises, in particular the Great Depression of 1929, became important reference points when the unfolding of the current crisis and economic policies were considered. The new importance of economic history is itself an outcome of the crisis. In the years leading up to the current crisis, many policy makers, investors and economists seemed convinced that the old rules of boom and bust no longer applied. As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff put it in their sweeping book on eight centuries of financial crises, the common creed was ‘This time is different.’ Like many times before, decision makers and the public were full of hope that the recent boom, unlike all the other past booms followed by tremendous crashes, was built on solid fundamentals and farsighted economic policy. The last years which saw the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression have proven them wrong. As a result, not only the wider public but also the economics profession, which overwhelmingly used to base empirical studies of financial crises on datasets beginning no earlier than 1980, have increasingly turned towards the more distant past for insights. History matters again. This special issue analyses the history of economic crises from the angle of international politics and its transformation throughout the twentieth century. It concentrates on the time since the late nineteenth century when the modern world economy came into being. The present crisis of the global financial system has triggered an intensive debate on the question of how financial markets can be effectively controlled by political institutions. It is usually argued that there is a basic asymmetry of power between global market actors (banks, financial investors, corporations) and political institutions, which still operate within the framework of the nation-state. While political and economic debates are revolving around the question of how to create effective forms of global governance, historians have discovered a long tradition of international economic regulation that can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In the global economy, not only sovereign defaults, but also banking