Global History Research Cluster (GHRC)
The research angle of the Global History Research Cluster derives from the postulation that the circulation of people, commodities and ideas have shaped our world throughout time. We analyse such global flows and networks from the eighteenth century onwards, often using the encounters model as an alternative to the national and regional models of historical research, cultural and economic contact and exchange being agents of historical change. Our research seeks to explain the ways in which these networks and flows have influenced the everyday lives of people, their identities and ideas, how they have set commodities and their meanings in motion, how the ‘global’ is being translated into the ‘local’ and, vice versa, how the ‘local’ feeds back into the ‘global’. All of us study transnational and global developments from a bottom-up perspective: from the Caribbean to Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We examine the extent to which modes of knowledge production, notions of identity and heritage, racial and religious categories, in these regions have changed in modern and early-modern history.