Intellectual History and Global History

Intellectual historians have long been interested in the wider trajectories of ideas beyond the European heartland of their enquiries. But a decline in confidence in post-war narratives of diffusion and development has been responsible for the emergence of new sets of questions about the relationship between intellectual history and global history. This new, globally oriented intellectual history has insisted variously on (a) the persistent diversity of intellectual worlds and intellectual genealogies, (b) the significance of transregional connections, (c) the need for sophisticated techniques of comparison, and (d) the irreducibility of 'global' ideas to their 'Western' provenance.