Journal

In the nineteenth century, as today, people communicated ideas through a vast range of media. This was the era of cartoonists like Emmanuel Poiré, picture journals like Punch and Eshimbun Nihonchi, the invention of the phonograph, and a flowering of puppet and lantern theater around the world. Many of these media conveyed messages and stories from the past, from Gustave Doré’s The Picturesque, Dramatic, and Caricatural History of Holy Russia, arguably the world’s first graphic history, to wayang histories of Hamza ibn Abdul-Muttalib and other Muslim figures, to ground-breaking data visualizations by W. E. B. DuBois, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Joseph Minard. Similarly, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature the unusual and alternate ways in which contemporary scholars depicted and interpreted the nineteenth century: descriptive maps, comics, data and architectural visualizations, experimental histories, and speculative biographies that mirror the richness of the nineteenth-century world. Reflective essays that engage with issues in the creative rendering of history are also welcome.

Submissions for this section should present and analyze unpublished (or not widely available) textual or visual materials that explore the world’s connectedness in the long nineteenth century. Global documents are primary sources such as private writings, author drafts, official or technical reports or the like, that capture convergences or entanglements among or across diverse world regions. We invite contributions that draw out the significance of unpublished materials found in archives, libraries, and private collections; or that explore printed texts and images with limited circulation, or about whose reception or use little is known. This section seeks to uncover the global narratives embedded in individual texts and images. If not in English, documents should be translated, but original versions may be included when appropriate. Other formats such as roundtable discussions of one or more documents will be considered. For all proposals, the word count should be at least 2,000 words and should not exceed 9,000 words (including footnotes).​

Identity has been a salient scholarly term across the humanities and social sciences since the mid-twentieth century. It can be understood as either an individual or collective phenomenon, as something that either persists through change or is unstable, as the result of self-identification processes or as something attributed by others. These ambiguities of meaning have inspired diverse and even contradictory theoretical approaches, leading to reflections on whether ‘identity’ is useful as an analytical concept. The categories of analysis developed by contemporary scholars, however, often differ from those that people in the past created and relied on to explain and organise their social practices. This section welcomes submissions that lay bare the contingent and possibly contradictory processes by which historical actors produced, organised, used, and contested identities and processes of identification in any particular setting — within and among imperial formations, regions, or nations — in the long nineteenth century.

Historians who study the nineteenth-century world are heir to a set of conceptual tools forged by intellectuals in a small part of that world. While euromethodologies have proven illuminating, much historical evidence has been cast aside without good reason, while the lived experience, truths, and knowledges of diverse peoples have been downgraded as “belief.” What alternative ways of doing history have been relegated to the shadows by our discipline’s post-Enlightenment assumptions? Global Nineteenth-Century Studies will periodically feature “History from Beyond”—interventions that seek to open up new questions or approaches beyond disciplinary norms, beyond humans, and beyond euromethodologies. We especially welcome submissions that seek to challenge the core assumptions of Western modernity, close the gap between Western constructions of the past and wider-world realities, decolonize and Indigenize historical storytelling, or more seamlessly integrate non-Western epistemologies, the unknown, or the mysterious into historical narrative.

The global dialogues, conflicts and collaborations that characterized the long nineteenth century were not resolved by diplomatic, military or economic power alone. Flows of knowledge and information were nurtured and reformulated as they circulated from and through different empires and colonies, carrying with them ever-changing imaginaries of their different societies, worldviews and circumstances. These complex conceptions of other communities profoundly conditioned the decisions of actors at different levels. The media, with the periodical press as the main protagonist, played an essential and influential role in their construction. This section invites articles, roundtables and discussion papers that explore the media that disseminated these global visions and their profound impact on the configuration of the nineteenth-century world.

Money and financial institutions were among the most powerful drivers of global integration during the long nineteenth century. As Benjamin J. Cohen argues, while the Westphalian model of the nation-state emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, the myth of One Nation/One Money—embodied in the territorialization of national currencies—materialized in the nineteenth century. Yet, alongside the consolidation of national currencies, “international money” continued to circulate across political and geographical boundaries, and new transnational monetary unions emerged.

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The growing prominence of central banks in the “West” paralleled the rise of the idea of an International Monetary System. However, the European model of financial integration was just one facet of a much broader global financial landscape. The nineteenth-century transportation and communication revolution facilitated unprecedented flows of capital across borders, sustained by the activities of bankers, traders, shroffs, qianzhuang, and other intermediaries. While the quest for financial stability led parts of the world to adopt gold as a standard of value, the silver economy remained dominant in regions such as the Indian Ocean. Simultaneously, regional and local exchange systems, often characterized by the complementary circulation of diverse means of exchange, sustained vibrant local markets despite efforts by political authorities to impose uniform currency areas.

This section of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies seeks to explore the dynamics of adaptation and hybridization within the global financial system, with a focus on the material diversity of financial instruments. We invite long or short essays (minimum 5,000 words) that center on the visual and material analysis of financial objects, including coins, banknotes, bills of exchange, and postal orders, as well as other widely employed mediums of exchange such as shells, salt bars, manillas, and cloth.

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By engaging with the materiality of these objects, this section aims to transcend their financial functions and illuminate the sociocultural roles and meanings embedded within them.