Globalization can be interpreted as a dialectical process of de- and re-territorialization. The challenges to existing borders that limit economic, socio-cultural, and political activities, and the establishment of new borders as the result of such activities, bring about certain consolidated structures of spatiality, while at the same time societies develop regulatory regimes to use these structures for purposes of dominance and integration. Global history in our understanding investigates the historical roots of those global conditions that have led to modern globalization and should therefore focus on the historicity of regimes of territorialization and their permanent renegotiation over time. There is, at present, a massive insecurity about patterns of spatiality and appropriate regulatory mechanisms. This article begins with a sketch of this current uncertainty and of two further characteristics of contemporary globalization. The second part examines discussions in the field of global history with regard to processes of de- and re-territorialization. In the third part, we suggest three categories that can serve both as a research agenda and as a perspective according to which a history of globalization can be constructed and narrated.

Un regard comparatif et ses fonctions L'historiographie allemande a derrière elle une longue tradition d'intérêt pour la Weltgeschichte 1 et les esquisses d'histoire universelle. Il ne peut s'agir ici de retracer cette histoire dans toutes ses ramifications, ni d'en donner une bibliographie complète, mais bien plutôt d'examiner les conditions intellectuelles et institutionnelles de cet intérêt actuel pour l'histoire globale. Même si un pays précis est ici pris en compte, il convient de toujours garder à l'esprit l'internationalisation croissante des échanges scientifiques. La RFA représente aujourd'hui sans aucun doute l'un des foyers de la discussion sur l'histoire globale. Cela s'explique d'abord par la recherche d'un nouveau statut dans un monde en voie de globalisation, après que les configurations de la Guerre Froide-qui avaient limité les possibilités d'action internationale des deux États allemands-ont été remplacées par d'autres. Cet intérêt s'explique également par la participation à un débat transnational inspiré par la recherche d'un nouvel ordre mondial et de ses fondements historiques-les connexions européennes, transatlantiques, postcoloniales y interagissant d'une manière complexe avec de nouvelles orientations théoriques et méthodologiques 2 .

Notions of the ‘global’ in historiography have a long tradition, and yet they appear to be a novelty. This article shows how older understandings of world history, imbued with Eurocentric presuppositions and universalist metaphysical reasoning, were questioned and revised in a long-term process. Recent criticism of Eurocentrism, linked with postcolonial scholarship, and the development of source-based approaches to study global connections and comparisons are usually recognized as innovations that took shape since the 1970s. In fact, they are rooted in profound conceptual revisions and academic institutionalization, which began much earlier. Based on the development of the field of world history in the United States, this article argues that concepts for a multipolar, interactive, and transcultural history developed from a dialectical and critical move away from older narratives. Historians and area specialists have wrestled for at least half a century with questions and problems that were rediscovered in the global turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, the example shows that the field developed in specific trajectories, reflecting local and national institutional academic circumstances, as well as specific socio-political contexts.

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