Swedish historians are often late with new historiographical trends, so it was no surprise that its main journal, in 2017, was trailing its Finish counterpart with a theme issue on Microhistory. This approach, from its Italian beginning in the 1970s, slowly spread to wider communities in Europe and the Americas, but with some notable exceptions. Sweden was one of these, but microhistory also struggled in Britain. Perhaps there is a conjunction in this, as new trends in Swedish history writing most often appeared as Anglo-America influences. With Global History, there is a reverse story, with an early adaptation from Swedish scholars of an approach with British and American roots. Writing the history of the globe has been a mainstay at both history and economic history departments in the last two decades.The topic of this paper is the recent development of attempting to merge these two approaches, into what has been labelled Global Microhistory, and in particularly the problems of two quite distinct historiographical traditions. I will do that from a position where I have published on early-modern Swedish iron making in its Atlantic setting, but foremost from a foundation of a forthcoming dense microhistory of labour and hushållning (in German ‘Hausen’ or ‘Haushalten’) in the northern parts of Uppland. This study has taken well over a decade to finish. My paper will deal with national traditions, language, historicism vs reading history backwards, theory vs finds from the archive and the lucid conception of historical change.

I propose to take Modern World-System Theory and re-cast it as a political-economic field of power. The advantage of characterizing this theory as a global field rather than merely a system is that the field model enhances our understanding of the diffuseness of power of the world system and the spatial dimensions of its operations. Understanding the diffuseness of the power of the Modern World-System and its spatiality better illustrates how its operations work independently from the direct intervention of agents within its field and how such power reproduces itself despite its transformations over space and time. Moreover, representing the political and economic forces at work in modern history as a field of power rather than as a system allows this modeling of power to work in tandem with the mechanisms of the globally recognized international state system without appearing that there are two different systems at play. Additionally, GPF will expand the scope of world-system analysis by centralizing political factors, in addition to its economic emphasis, by articulating a global governance regime where there is “governance without government.” Thus, this field model of the world system centralizes issues of international relations in addition to matters of political economy.The presentation will then show how the dynamics of the Global Power Field (GPF) evolved from WWII to the present. The particular cases I will draw from to illustrate this paradigm will come from the modern Middle East: the 19th-century Ottoman Empire and post-revolutionary Iran. Even though these two cases come from the same geographic region, they will illustrate two distinct phases in the transforming character of this field.

We propose a different periodisation of globalisation and the process of the advent of the world system. Starting from the main lines of Amin, Braudel, Wallerstein, Arrighi and Polanyi, we sketch out a complementary and competing periodisation. It is based on the phyletic tree of humanity and the processes of social reproduction from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and the ancient phases. epistemes show that modernity has begun without being disconnected from metaphysics. And beliefs we postulate the advent of an initially megaloensemble composed of world systems that ignore each other until their agglomeration through the unrecognised syncretism of the epistemes and the expansion of the capitalist mode of production and the eurocentric erasure. We propose a different periodisation of globalisation and the process of the advent of the world system. Starting from the main lines of Amin, Braudel, Wallerstein, Arrighi and Polanyi, we sketch out a complementary and competing periodisation. It is based on the phyletic tree of humanity and the processes of social reproduction from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and the ancient phases. epistemes show that modernity has begun without being disconnected from metaphysics. we postulate the advent of an initially megaloensemble composed of world systems that ignore each other until their agglomeration through the unrecognised syncretism of the epistemes and the expansion of the capitalist mode of production and the eurocentric erasure of the contributions of the history of the others, mainly by the victors , the west again the rest. political hegemony of the reconstruction of world history goes beyond coloniality and opens up a perspective in which modernity is still ahead of us.

In response to human activities becoming the largest geological force shaping the planet, the Anthropocene has been proposed as a new (geological) epoch in the history of the Earth. The concept has been enormously successful and has established itself solidly in the academic discourse (and beyond) since its proposal in 2000. Critics, however, have highlighted how the Anthropocene remains highly contradictory, as it seeks to problematise human dominance while reaffirming this very dominance through elevating the human to its own epoch, as well as ignoring social and cultural differences within human communities. Moreover, this human epoch is declared at the exact moment, when humans notice that it is not just them who shape the planet but that we are part of a multi-species collective making the world. The paper will ask and explore, whether the Anthropocene and its intermingling of human and natural history can be conceived as a new universal history or whether the Anthropocene demands a new universal history; what might be at stake if we acknowledge the Anthropocene as a new universal history; and whether this proves a productive or a problematic universal history. The paper will explore, in other words, whether and how the Anthropocene raises the question of universal history anew. For this, I will take recourse to Susan Buck-Morss’ reappraisal of universal history via a materialist critique of Hegel and suggest, that the Anthropocene indeed demands a new universal history if we want to move past it.