The “Global History in Chile and Japan” project workshop was held in the Faculty of Language and Literature of the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, on a pleasant early summer’s day. The five participants from Japan were Ryuto Shimada (University of Tokyo), Ei Murakami (Kyoto University), Hideaki Suzuki (Nagasaki University), Shunsuke Matsuo (Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo), and Tomoko Morikawa (University of Tokyo).

In his opening remarks, Pro-Vice Chancellor Sol Serrano spelt out the importance of global history in making de-centralization possible, and emphasized the necessity for collaboration to achieve this among major universities around the world. In the subsequent first session, “Global History and the Latin American and Japanese Context,” presentations were made by Javier Puente (Catholic University of Chile), Alessandro Santoni (University of Santiago, Chile), Matsuo and Suzuki.
In a presentation entitled “Changing Environments and Armed Conflicts: El Niño in the Global Twentieth Century,” Puente demonstrated that abnormal weather events lead to famine, poverty, migration, and exile, providing the audience with a novel and effective explanation of a global phenomenon, El Niño. Puente showed that the El Niño event of 1982–83, the largest in the twentieth century, triggered military clash in Peru.
As an example of global circulation, reception and reorganization of political ideologies, Santoni argued in his presentation “La derecho y ‘la ‘interferencia’ externa” en el proceso politico chileno (1980-88)’ (“‘Interventions’ from the right and the external world in the Chilean political process”) that the right-wing military government in Chile sought global connections with right-wing forces in Spain and Germany in search of an identity of their regime as well as a basis for legitimacy while being increasingly undermined in Chile in the 1980s.
Matsuo’s presentation, entitled “The Early History of Olympism in Uruguay: A Small Country in the Globalizing World” focused on this small country in Latin America, and discussed the Olympic movement, arguably one of the indexes of globalization of the twentieth century. Matsuo emphasized the voluntary aspect of the “local” side as well as its importance by pointing out that, right from the beginning, the “periphery” that is the Uruguayan government was actively and subjectively engaged with a process that was not led completely by organizations from the “center” like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).
In his presentation entitled “Global History, World History, Gurobaru hisutori, … and beyond,” Suzuki outlined Tadashi Hada’s Towards New World History after briefly reporting on the need for global history in Japan. Suzuki emphasized that “new world history,” or “global history,” could serve as a platform upon which historians could collaborate beyond borders, pointing out that in order to achieve this, the position and approach of each historian would need to be made transparent.

In the second session, “The Global Turn in History,” Joaquín Fernandois (Catholic University of Chile) took “western history” as his background to argue that there are two methodological bases in global history, “interaction” and “analogy,” in a presentation entitled “La politica mundial: marxismo y neopopulismo (World politics: Marxism and neo-populism).” Fernandois further discussed the possibilities these two concepts could bring to the analysis of global political process by referring to the people’s fronts in Spain and Chile in the 1930s as well as to neo-populism in contemporary Latin America and the Philippines.
In the next presentation, Murakami, a specialist in Chinese history, gave a presentation entitled “Global History and Economic History of China,” in which he argued that presentation of Chinese economic “systems” by research in global history would provide comparative material for the development of this field by drawing on the contributions and problems identified by the theory of an Asian trading zone developed in Japan and in the Californian School.
Suzuki, making a second appearance in the series, gave a further presentation entitled “Abolitions as a Global Experience: Abolition of Slavery and Global History,” arguing that the theme “abolition of slavery” might provide one method for critiquing globalization today because while this process can be understood as a common experience in world history achieved via political unity, there are still many examples around the world where the premises of political unity and thus the opposition of “freedom” and “slavery,” do not exist. This contradiction needs to be addressed.
The last presenter of the series, Fernando Purcell (Catholic University of Chile), gave a presentation entitled “Global Great Society vs Global War on Poverty: A view from South America during the 1960s,” in which he explored the question of how the processes of globalization have been experienced. His presentation referred to a paradigm shift in relation to “humanitarian aid” from the United States to Latin America during the Cold War of the 1960s. Purcell proposed the adoption of a new perspective, “the other way round,” i.e., looking at this process from the point-of-view of Latin Americans.

All eight presentations offered new perspectives and insights into global history and the question-and-answer period at the end of each session saw lively exchanges of ideas about the further development of new perspectives and the possibility of development. In addition, as this was the first joint workshop between Japan and Chile, many questions arose from both sides in relation to how to grasp “global history,” the framework of historical research, issues of periodization, positionality, and “world history” curricula at the university level in order to understand each other’s backgrounds and current situation. On the whole, presenters respected the time allocation and the workshop proceeded in a collegiate atmosphere, including during the luncheon. This attempt has proven to be an invaluable opportunity to get to know each other better and to deepen the relationship with a view to future collaboration; as such, the day provided ample intellectual stimulation for all participants.

(Written by Tomoko Morikawa)