| Book Review | Journal of World History, 15.3

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| Book Review | Journal of World History, 15.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Edited by THOMAS BENDER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 427 + ix pp. $55.00 (hardcover); $22.50 (paper).

In the opening sentence of their contribution to this collected volume, Charles Bright and Michael Geyer ask, "What could be more American than a move to reposition U.S.-American history in the path of world history — to frame a new historical imagination appropriate for a transnational polity in a global age?" (p. 63). It is indeed the case that historians in the United States have been leading practitioners of world history. But I don't think that this is what Bright and Geyer had in mind. In this collection of sixteen essays, I found only three references to the work of world historians, and only two authors (neither based in the United States) referred to more than one work in a non-English language. The "global" in this new historical imagination refers less to the expansion of historical methods and empirical knowledge than to the imagination of a conceptual space from which to reinterpret familiar material. Many of the chapters revolve around two questions: to what extent should we subsume American history under global narratives, and to what extent can recent world history be understood as the extension of American hegemony? Opinion seems to lean toward "not much" and "quite a bit" as the respective answers.

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