Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

European Expansion and
Globalisation
Description
One of the central themes of the history of the last
five hundred years is the phenomenon currently
referred to as the process of globalisation. In this
process, a central role has been played in the past
by the phenomenon of Western European expansion,
the various ways in which other continents
responded to this and the developments resulting
from this expansion. Globalisation means the
emergence of a world economy, worldwide migration
flows, the birth of nation states and many
other phenomena. Central to this history are the
early activities of the chartered trading companies,
the rise of colonial empires and enterprises,
resistance movements, wars of independence and
decolonization, all of which have left us their
archives whose unique character stems from the
interaction between expanding and contracting
Europe and the rest of the world. It is therefore no
coincidence that this history has its own historiography
and its own journals. Owing to the rich
economic, anthropological and political data they
contain, ‘colonial’ archives are also of inestimable
value in the study of the autochthonous history of
non-Western areas, as demonstrated by the
success of the TANAP and ENCOMPASS projects
which the history department of Leiden University
is presently carrying out in close cooperation with
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academic institutions in Asia and South Africa.
The scholarly and societal importance of studying
the history of European expansion and global
interaction cannot be overemphasized.
The history department plays an important role in
the study of global history. As early as 1902,
Leiden University offered lectures on ‘colonial
history’, but from the 1950s onwards turned
towards ‘global history’. This concept should not
be understood in the sense of the comparative
method, but as an approach which focuses on the
study of emerging global connections in history.
As the American historian Patrick Manning put it:
‘Connection conveys the character of world
historical analysis better than any other term. It
acknowledges locality and uniqueness, yet also invokes
broad patterns’. (Navigating World History:
Historians Create a Global Past 2003).
In this context, the history department of Leiden
University centres on the study of global interaction
processes making use of the wide range of
primary sources available in the broad environment
of the university. Leiden possesses in this
respect a unique infrastructure for the use of both
primary and secondary source materials. Not only
are the rich archives of the VOC, the WIC and the
former Ministry of Colonies in the National
Archives in The Hague located at a fifteen minutes
distance by public rail system from Leiden, but the
Leiden University Library also houses the entire
library collection of the former Ministry of
Colonies, while the KITLV and Africa Institute
have world famous collections on Caribbean,
Southeast Asian and African history. In addition,