Following on from the winter school for graduate students, a workshop titled "National Narratives of Global Integration" was held at Princeton University on January 26 and 27, 2018. Participants included researchers from each of the GHC bases in Tokyo, Princeton, Paris (EHESS), and Berlin (Humboldt University) with Beijing University Professor Bao Maohong, visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia for the 2017 academic year, as a researcher from the Tokyo base. This workshop was a continuation of discussions that took place at the session during the summer school held in Berlin in September 2017, for which a compendium of papers is scheduled to be published as the outcome of several workshops on the same theme.

The format for the workshop was that, over 120 minutes in each of the panels designated by theme, two reporters gave brief explanations of papers that had been distributed in advance, followed by comments from discussants, after which free discussions involving all participants were held. Based on the theme of the workshop, each report attempted to analyze nation-state narratives that had developed in international relations during each era. Looking at the global context of narratives that have been conventionally interpreted and comprehended within the framework of the histories of single countries brings a very different landscape into view. While there were unique characteristics in each individual presentation, the reporters construct their arguments in full recognition of this contrast, resulting in a very solid, high-level workshop.

A vigorous exchange of views took place regarding the methodology of global history in each of the panels. For instance, when modelling the international propagation of narratives, rather than an examination that focuses on the unilateral Eurocentric flow, the importance of the introduction of perspectives originating in Japan or China, or arguments from individual narratives that keep in view the value standards of the "Eastern Bloc" during the Cold War, the era of the construction of nation-states, or the decolonialization movements were also considered. In sum, the researchers having engaged in an upgrading or sharing of their framework of global history, it was possible to confirm the focus for developments at the next meeting.

The presentations from researchers whose research themes are well established and the discussions, which were rigorous, but which also abounded in humor and laughter, provided a rich learning experience for the graduate students who participated in the workshop. In addition, at the dinner held on the first evening, each of the researchers was asked to relate their "most embarrassing episode in field studies," resulting in an extremely enjoyable evening of reminiscences of each of the researchers' experiences in different parts of the world. The motivation for research flared up in the graduate students when they imagined themselves as researchers who might one day be able to give eloquent speeches about humorous episodes that had happened to them at such an internationally diverse dining table.

The program for the two-day workshop was as follows.

January 26
Panel 1, "Law, Empires and World Orders" Comment Cyrus Schayegh (Geneva)
Paules Xavier (EHESS), "Going beyond the 'Western impact' narrative: China as a world power, 1850-1950"
Natasha Wheatley (Princeton), "The Boomerang of Imperial Sovereignty: Bosnia Herzegovina in the Eye of the World Storm"

Panel 2, "19th century makings" Comment Masashi Haneda (Tokyo)
SANO Mayuko (Tokyo), "Describing the self and finding a place in the world: Japan at 19th century expos"
Matthew Karp (Princeton), "'This Nation is a Globe': Nineteenth-Century American Narratives of Global Integration"

Panel 3, "Decolonization Narratives" Comment Jeremy Adelman (Princeton)
Marc Elie (EHESS), "The decolonized observe decolonization: Soviet Central Asian elites and the independence of Asia and Africa, 1940s-1980s"
Vincent Houben (Humboldt), "Decolonization Narratives - global Indonesia"

January 27
Panel 4, "Personal Narratives of the Global" Comment Andreas Eckert (Humboldt)
BAO Maohong (Beijing), "Three Chinese politicians' national narratives of global integration and their influences on history writing in China"
Silvia Sebastiani (EHESS), "How to write the history of a colony? Edward Long's History of Jamaica, between the national and the global"