• Four Strategies for Global Thinking: Olstein outlines four strategies for thinking history globally: comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing.

• Twelve Areas of Historical Study: Olstein identifies 12 branches of history that embody his global thinking strategies, including Comparative History, Relational History, New International History, and more.

• Case Study of Perón's Rule: Olstein uses the rule of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina as a case study to illustrate the application of these 12 historical fields, contrasting traditional and global perspectives.

• Comparative and Relational Histories: Comparative history contrasts Perón's regime with similar regimes, while relational history examines the interconnections between societies, such as the decline of the British Empire's impact on Argentina.

• New International and Transnational Histories: Olstein highlights sports, the Red Cross, and naval developments as key areas for new international and transnational history studies.

• World-System and Global History Approaches: The world-system approach considers Argentina's economic independence, while global history examines the interconnected world and the impact of globalization on Perón's regime.

• Final Case Study: World War I: Olstein applies his global thinking principles to analyze the causes and impacts of World War I, considering perspectives from global history, historical sociology, and other fields.

• Comparison with Manning's Work: Olstein's methodology is compared to Patrick Manning's "Navigating World History," highlighting different approaches to global historical analysis.

Patrick Manning, in his forward to Diego Olstein’s book Thinking History Globally asks the reader, "Do we think of the past century as a unique moment in history? Or do we see it as representative of processes in the deeper history of mankind?” As students engage with the study of history in the 21st century they may be looking for history classes that are more inclusive, considered, and global.  Educators and historians must therefore apply a more generalized approach to teaching history.  Thinking History Globally provides both a blueprint and a methodology for history professionals and students to help incorporate an expanded view of history in their writings and work.  ‘Thinking history globally’ therefore challenges all of us to begin “thinking beyond fixed boundaries, thinking out of the box, thinking globally [as] an outgrowth of our contemporary global experience,” Olstein introduces the reader to his conceptualization of this method by delineating the “four strategies for thinking history globally: Comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing.”

Using these strategies, a researcher or student can input data from various historical fields to arrive at a more formative evaluation of historical processes and events.  As part of Olstein’s methodology, there are twelve areas of historical study that best materialize these strategies.  His “book presents all of these ‘histories that sweep across centuries, languages, cultures…,’ and polities, and it does so by identifying twelve branches of history that address the past beyond frontiers. The presentation of these 12 branches in their singularities and commonalities allows defining, applying, and exemplifying [these] four major strategies for thinking history globally…The distillation of the large literatures evolved by these 12 cross-boundary branches of history into these four big Cs of global thinking aims to encourage and guide how to think history globally and how to distinguish our global present from the vintage point of a global past.” By synthesizing the inputs from these fields and analyzing them through the lens of the ‘4 c’s’, students and professional historians can begin the practice of constructing truly global histories.

These twelve areas of study include: Comparative History, Relational History, New International History, Transnational History, Oceanic Histories, Civilizational Analysis, Historical Sociology, The World-System Approach, Global History, History of Globalization, World History, and Big History.  Using an historical event, the rule of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina, which lasted from 1946-1955 and included an appeal to the working class, transforming Argentina’s political and social environments, Olstein gives a broad overview of incorporating these fields of studies to distinguish between a traditional methodology (a “nation-state based” accounting) and a more broad and inclusive global historical perspective. “Political historians wrote careful accounts of Perón’s political party, regime, decision-making, constitutional reform, political struggles from within and without, and fluctuations in power. Similarly, they paid close attention to his “Third Position” (neither capitalist nor communist) in foreign policy and his relations with Cold War-age superpowers as well as neighboring states.”

For comparative history, Olstein contrasts Perón’s regime with that of Getulio Vargas, a contemporary authoritarian regime in Brazil whose timeline mirrors that of Perón.  Contrasting and comparing these two regimes, as well as that of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime (Egypt, 1956-1970), he concludes that the activities of these regimes similarly resulted in, for example, land reform and the nationalization of certain industries.  For relational history, which looks for “entwinements between societies," a suggested topic might include a comparison between societies that have aspects that are interrelated, Olstein uses Great Britain as his subject, as ‘the decline of the British Empire represented a blow for the Argentinian economic elite…” These events produced markedly different results in their respective countries, as Perón’s regime transformed and modernized the economy of Argentina.

For new international history, transnational history, and oceanic histories, Olstein notes that sports including tennis and soccer, the Red Cross, and the development of a navy, partially from beached, World War-era warships, respectively, are key areas of study.  In the areas of civilizational analysis and historical sociology Olstein invites the scholar to expand his comparative analysis to Latin America, and to consider “the application of conciliatory policies between social classes in order to form a broad social condition” during Perón’s rule, as areas of research.  The world-system approach allows the student to consider the idea that during Perón’s regime Argentina was as an “anti-hegemonic party state”. Argentina was like many growing, similarly situated semi-peripheral states and its transformation “meant the achievement of economic independence by ending the cycle of unequal exchange through import-substitution industrialization.”

Using global history, “the challenge is to write a history as…an outcome of the interconnected world created by the process of globalization.” The world economy changing during two World Wars and the Great Depression encouraged protectionist policies in semi-peripheral states, and Perón’s regime emerged, like other similarly situated regimes, adding a more global dimension to this history. World history spans some 2.5 million years, and Olstein recommends studying the long history of labor and worker rights and the “thriving for convergence with the industrialized world” as processes. These illuminate on how the retreat of the British Empire from the Atlantic basin during the 20th century made room for Perón’s regime and Argentina’s transformation.  Big History, living on a 13.7-billion-year time scale, informs the reader about "the emergence of the modern world” in the 20th century and encourages contextualizing Argentina’s transformation during this time.

In this way, a traditional historical analysis of these events can be transformed.  Some of the contributions of this methodology to ‘thinking history globally’ include Argentina’s emergence “as part of a broader phenomenon," (conceptualization), the consideration of the “presence of the informal British Empire”(connections), Argentina viewed as being a part of a “cluster of societies geographically, historically, and culturally”(comparisons), such as the phenomenon of “the development of mass party support…coming from such diverse places as the Communist Soviet Union”(contextualization).

From this premise, Olstein launches into an exposition on each of the twelve areas of study that are encompassed by this method, so that students and educators have a deeper understanding of how these fields can elucidate on thinking history globally.  We read, through the prism of the decline of the Roman Empire, that comparative and relational histories are used for comparing and connecting themes, that new international history, transnational history, and oceanic histories offer variety when making connections, that we can conceptualize a global history through civilizational analysis, historical sociology, and the world-system approach, and “contextualizing on a bigger scale” can be achieved using global history, the history of globalization, world history, and big history.  These historical fields are typologies in this system of ‘thinking history globally’ and considering them independently on their merits as it relates to a particular subject or research endeavor adds context, inputs, and perspectives that otherwise may be missing from traditional nation-state based historical projects.  Olstein “challenges the reader to sketch their history 12 times to realize the potentials of the horizons opened up by thinking history globally before pursuing the most suitable or affordable project.”

Olstein describes these twelve fields as containing singularities, overlaps, and clusters by space. Civilizational analysis, transnational history, oceanic histories, and big history represent singular units of analysis.  Similarly, these field properties are also apparent by time, and by “disciplines, methods, and sources.” “Mapping” these singularities, their overlaps, and clusters with the 4 C’s provides the framework in which a broad analysis can proceed. 

Following from this, the author describes how a student or professional may compare or connect, or how they may compare and connect to achieve “the transcendence of political boundaries, moving beyond one’s self-enclosed unit, [as] the necessary condition for thinking history globally.” Using the “’dawn of civilization’, ‘imperial history’, and ‘the American Divergence’” as illustrations, we learn that “the establishment of differences and/or commonalities, on the one hand, or searching for relationship between units, on the other hand, is the radical difference between comparative and connective methods.” As methodological nationalism as analysis was a precursor to global and world histories, comparative methods transitioned into connective methods.  Comparing and connecting broadens our historical grasp by, for example, understanding 19th century slavery as a world system, or contrasting and connecting Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  In this latter example, a comparison may note the “component parts of these regimes” while a connective analysis may flesh out the subtle differences in perceptions between communist Germans and communist Russians, which may have contributed to the fact that a “transnational revolutionary movement” never materialized in Europe.

After spending time expositing on these twelve fields and their contents, Olstein pivots to a final case study – “A Last Rehearsal” – and analyzes the beginning of World War I, applying his principles for ‘thinking history globally’ to demonstrate the value of this method of historical analysis.  Olstein recounts the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, a proximate cause of the first World War.  Global history could “take the first World War up the scale of inquiry by placing it in the context [of] warfare for the achievement of European and global hegemony.” Analyzing this event from the world history perspective might result in a “search for the occurrence of the fundamental phenomenon of which the First World War is just one occurrence.” Global history analysis might turn on the phenomenon in world history to “portray the First World War as a major confrontation in a series of world wars.”

Since belligerent nations tended to “turn their resources inward” the finished products produced by these nations were diminished in global markets.  Historical sociology can add to this history by delineating the rise of Germany as an industrial superpower in the early 20th century, while the world-system approach might address the alignment of various superpowers, stressing the hegemons, or analyzing them as either maritime or terrestrial powers.  A civilizational approach could deal with the fact that this World War had a distinctly “European character,” but that nations from all over the globe participated.

Oceanic histories might analyze the First World War from the perspective of various navies, new international history can contribute by analyzing migration patterns of European peoples, or the “effort to recruit…capital” by nations around the globe.  Transnational history might offer an analysis of “the ways in which Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist political parties and unions exchange information.”. A comparative analysis of the First World War could take a birds-eye view of both the Western and Eastern Fronts, where on the Western Front were positioned “industrialized nations” and on “the Eastern Front, instead, was a theater of confrontation between economies developing..." Finally, relational histories might relate the entanglement of these Fronts both before and during the War.

Considering Thinking History Globally side by side with a related monograph, Patrick Manning’s own Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past, we are left with a broad overview of the history and practice of thinking about global and world histories, their values, methods, and futures.  From Manning we learn the history of world history and the value of imparting a larger, global interpretation of history.  First, from Manning we take in the history of the field of world history and finish with his advice on fields of study and research for teachers and graduate students. We learn that exploratory comparison, then modeling dynamics, and connecting subsystems is the author’s suggested model for analysis of a case study. From Olstein, we read about another method for ‘thinking history globally’ that can be applied when analyzing case studies. Starting with an analysis of the twelve fields to “[cross] historical boundaries," then moving to comparison and connection, and then to conceptualization and contextualization, we synthesize a complex history in Thinking History Globally.

Olstein finishes his book stating that “thinking history globally provides a solid base for understanding our global present.” This sentiment carries forward into our lives working in and studying history as paradigmatic for analyzing historical events, people, and places from an inclusive vantage point, which marries the broad field of the social sciences with history in a new, fresh way.

References

Olstein, Diego. Thinking History Globally. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Kindle Edition.