Sebas Rümke, M.A.
Topic
Chinese Perspectives of Global History in the Age of China’s Globalization
Abstract
In the early 1950s, the recently founded Chinese People’s Republic imported an understanding of history from the Soviet Union in which national history (Chinese history) and “world history” (which actually was foreign history) were considered as two separate historical realties, which were to be studied and instructed in strict isolation from each other. With the increasing integration of the People’s Republic into international society since the early 1980s, the national government in Beijing began to promote a perspective in which Chinese historical experiences are understood against a background of global historical developments in order to prepare its citizens for China’s new role as player on the global stage.
Chinese academic historians who sought to implement a new global perspective of history often turned for inspiration towards American and European authors. Since the mid-1980s, different Western conceptions of global history have been dripping into the landscape of Chinese historiography. Chinese historians, however, rarely exactly imitated these Western ideas of global history, but have been selective in what features to embrace and which ones to reform or ignore, thereby forming new Chinese perceptions of global history. At the same time, the old conceptual and institutional distinction between “Chinese history” and “world history” remains strong in many places, and not all initiatives to introduce a more integrative perspective in Chinese historical scholarship have been successful.
This PhD project studies how Chinese perspectives of global history were formed through encounters with Western ideas about global history from the mid-1980s up to the present day. The content of Chinese global historical writings, as well as the degree of success of Chinese initiatives of global history, are explained by focusing on the interplay between authors’ individual motivations, and China’s cultural and political landscape that indicated the authors’ room for academic maneuver.
Biography
Sebas Rümke studied history at the VU University of Amsterdam, focusing primarily on global history, theory of history, and the combination of historical and anthropological research methods. He graduated in 2015 with a thesis on Chinese perspectives of global history, for which he stayed for one year at the Global History Center of Capital Normal University in Beijing. In 2016, his M.A. thesis was awarded with the 2nd prize in the annual International Institute of Social History/De Volkskrant thesis competition for the best M.A. thesis in history written at a Dutch university. Since March 2017, he is conducting PhD research at the University of Hamburg.
Contact
sebastiaan.ruemke@studium.uni-hamburg.de