Global and international history quite often relies on Western language primary sources and a mainly Anglophone secondary literature. There indeed exists some resistance to deep engagement with non-Western sources that might disrupt Eurocentric traditional historiographies. Thus, for the junior global Middle Eastern historians of this proposed workshop, to unpack a single source is an excellent exercise to advance their own research and integrate global and Middle Eastern history.
This workshop will focus on space. This offers a double advantage. Global historians have recognized the importance of space—asserted in general by the spatial turn —perhaps more than national historians. And for various reasons, the Middle East presents itself as a fruitful platform to think through issues of space in global history:
1) The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) form the geographical pivot of the Old World. Many Euro-African, Afro-Asian, Asian-European, and Eurafrasian connectivities have had to go through and/or involve MENA. As a result, MENA offers a useful platform to think through historically contingent connections and propose new avenues of comparison.
2) Simultaneously, MENA’s heterogeneity is second to none, lending itself to complex thinking about the contested natures of regions.
3) MENA allows us to invert the gaze, challenging some Eurocentric assumptions still implicit in global approaches to history. But crucially, it does not presuppose a historically unchanging, geographically clear Europe or Middle East—for MENA and Europe existentially and spatially overlap.
4) MENA’s geographical centralities are not set and timeless. Rather, they have manifested in changing ways through time. Several factors are at play. One is new transport, communication, and engineering technologies like those facilitating the 1859-1869 construction of the Suez Canal. These and other factors have repeatedly modified how—and how unequally—space is used and experienced in MENA and beyond. Crucially, these uses and experiences include disconnections, a topic that is becoming as central a concern to global historians as connections.