The First GHC Summer School was held at Tokyo University from September 7-12, 2015. Here is the report from the students of Tokyo team who participated in the Summer School.

 

Seminar sessions began on the first day of the Global History Collaborative (GHC) First Summer School (Monday, September 7, 2015). In his opening address, Professor Haneda explained the method for managing the temporal scale, spatial scale, and global history scale, but he focused on the discussions slated for the summer school (i.e., participating graduate students were requested to submit papers on their own research themes in advance). Next, the participants introduced themselves and two sessions were held. Session 1 (“Colonial and Decolonial”) was chaired by Professor Conrad, and Session 2 (“Shared Knowledge and Science)” was chaired by Professor Adelman. In each session, participants studied the papers submitted by graduate students. The following describes the seminar sessions in more detail:

Session 1 (Colonial and Decolonial)

Fabian Krautwald (Berlin)

Colonialism, Revolution, and the Scaling of History—The German Colonial Society 1918–1919

Nakano Saki (EHESS)

Defining “Africa”: the Pan-African Struggles of the Young Elites during the Decolonization in West Africa (1945–1962)

Session 2 (Shared Knowledge and Science)

Emily Kern (Princeton)

Evolution’s Footprints: Transnational Science, Human Identity, and the Emergence of Global Research Networks in Twentieth Century Biology

Emoto Hiroshi (Tokyo)

The Reception History of John Ruskin: Towards a Global History of Modern Architectural Thought

Fukuhara Kotaro (Tokyo)

Factors of the Development of Rice Farming in High Latitudes: An Example from Northeastern China

 

Session 1, which dealt with the themes of colonization and decolonization, began with a discussion of Fabian Krautwald’s paper. Krautwald explained trends in the German Colonial Society at the peak of and after the November Revolution and analyzed discussions about the society’s membership and internal organization. The general discussion focused on the question of whether or not the worldwide spread of the concept of self-determination advocated by President Wilson should be viewed as global history.

 

Next, Nakao Saki considered Africa and its political impact, focusing on the process of decolonization in West Africa from 1945 to 1962. She took questions from the audience that included “What sort of people were the elites and students who led the Pan-African Movement?” and “How did Africans relate to other regional ideologies, such as Pan-Arabism, European, and so on?”

 

Both researches showed that ideas advocated by the Colonial Society’s members, elites, students, etc. were linked to the worldwide decolonization process. It is believed that the links between global ideologies and regional and state power are themes of extreme importance in the narration of global history.

 

Session 2 (afternoon), entitled “Shared Knowledge and Science,” began with a discussion by Emily Kern, who argued that twentieth century research on the origins of the human race was influenced by global affairs, imperialism, the rise of Nazism, and World War II. In response to the emphasis on national identity in historical narratives that supports nation-states, the view has emerged in recent years that there must be a global identity among people throughout the world. However, the difficulty associated with achieving this objective has been clearly shown by the state of the human origins research network.

 

Next, Emoto Hiroshi, who considered the architectural thought of John Ruskin (1819–1900), presented a method for verifying how the world accepted Ruskin’s concepts and examined differences caused by dissimilarities between translated languages and regions. Discussions concerned research methods and languages necessary for using digital archives.

 

Finally, the paper presented by Fukuhara Kotaro considered the increase in rice production during the twentieth century in Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. Fukuhara proposed application of the agricultural research method (i.e., analyzing technical aspects and climatic conditions for predicting rice production) to historical narration. Questions from the floor concerned the impact of political and economic factors as well as humans on rice production.

 

Throughout Session 2, I was given the impression that creative methods are necessary for establishing dialogues; even though all the research discussed can be summed up as historical research. It is noteworthy that required knowledge and research methods vary between the natural sciences, architecture, agriculture, and other fields. Therefore, it was necessary for the participants arrived on the first day of summer school to provide a personal introduction with an additional focus on representing their specialized field and to try communicating according to the framework of global history. In retrospect, the introduction and the discussions on the first day was very meaningful in this respect. Looking back on the entire summer school experience, I think that the very relaxed atmosphere of the second half of the event enabled researchers to conduct dialogues even more freely with researchers in other fields.                               ( TERADA Yuki)