A Joint Seminar of the Center for Historical Research and the Global History Group (University of Copenhagen) with the support of the Danish Cultural Institute in Russia "Contested Global History"

On June 7, a regular meeting of the scientific seminar "Boundaries of History" was held by the joint efforts of the Center for Historical Research (Department of History of the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg) and the Global History Group (University of Copenhagen) with the support of the Danish Cultural Institute in Russia. The theme of the workshop was "Contested Global History".

The seminar began with a brief presentation by Director of the Danish Cultural Institute in Russia, Finn Andersen, who recalled the long tradition of cultural and academic interconnections between Russia and Denmark and the necessity to maintain these established cultural ties between the two countries, regardless of the dynamics of contemporary political relations between the Russian Federation and the European Union. The introductory speech was made by the Director of the Center for Historical Research Alexander Semyonov, who told the guests about the achievements of the Department of History of the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg in the field of international cooperation and studies of global history.

The first session of the seminar began with the paper «Decolonization and the Unmaking of the Global Britain», which was read by Professor Stuart Ward and was devoted to the problems of the disintegration of the British Empire and the cultural space that was created by the imperial power, as well as the influence exerted by this global process on the modern British self-awareness and identity. Then Professor Alexander Semyonov presented a paper on the problems of the imperial transformation of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which he talked about the current trends in the historical writing on imperial diversity, the departure from the dogmatic opposition between the concepts of the empire and the nation, and the methodological school of the New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia. Finally, Associate Professor Peter Bang shared with the participants of the seminar the intermediate results of his current research, «"A League of 5 Mighty Monarchies" - Rome, Universal Empires and a Precolonial World History», in which he tried to establish the limits of the applicability of the methodological framework of global history to the historical material of Antiquity and the Early Modern time on the example of several composite empires of Eurasia during these periods.

During the second session of the seminar, the participants listened to the report by the Associate Professor Nathan Marcus «Global Finance and Empires» on the concept of the "Empire Effect" and the controversy of contemporary historians of the economy on the impact on the economies of the colonized countries by the period under the rule of European metropolises. Professor of anthropology Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov presented the paper «Gifts of empire and the anthropology of exchange», which is devoted to the history of the relationship between the Soviet state and the indigenous peoples of Northern Siberia and to the question, how the deep study of the imperial context can change and enrich the gift theory that is a key idea for the entire social anthropology. The last presentation of the session - «Out of Place, into Order: Place-Making Regimes, Itinerant Cultures and the Nineteenth Century Making of the Modern World» (Doctor Martin Müller) - was devoted to important concepts and methodological aspects of the modern global history, such as the model of the "long 19th century ", studies of various scenarios of modernization and the phenomenon of nomadism in the Modernity.

The seminar ended with a general discussion of the presentations and a roundtable that was devoted to the key issues of research and teaching of global and imperial history in modern universities.

Report by Nikita Fomin