Volumes published (2006) I. Thematic Work ... - CLIOHRES.net

Europe and the world in European historiography / edited by Csaba Lévai
(Thematic work group)
940.072 (21.)
1. Europa - Storiografia I. Lévai, Csaba
CIP a cura del Sistema bibliotecario dell’Università di Pisa
This volume is published, thanks to the support of the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission,
by the Sixth Framework Network of Excellence CLIOHRES.net under the contract CIT3-CT-2005-006164.
The volume is solely the responsibility of the Network and the authors; the European Community cannot be held
responsible for its contents or for any use which may be made of it.
Volumes published (2006)
I. Thematic Work Groups
I. Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformations
II. Power and Culture: Hegemony, Interaction and Dissent
III. Religion, Ritual and Mythology. Aspects of Identity Formation in Europe
IV. Professions and Social Identity. New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society
V. Frontiers and Identities: Exploring the Research Area
VI. Europe and the World in European Historiography
II. Transversal Theme
I. Citizenship in Historical Perspective
III. Doctoral Dissertations
I. F. Peyrou, La Comunidad de Ciudadanos. El Discurso Democrático-Republicano en España, 1840-1868
Cover: World Map (Amsterdam 1662), Spencer Collection, New York Public Library. © 2006. Photo: The New York
Public Library/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
© Copyright 2006 by Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press
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Michele Gasparello

Introduction
This volume contains a number of short chapters about the historical connections between
Europe and the World. But what is Europe, and what is the World? And what
characterized the relationship between Europe and the rest of the World from the beginnings
of human history to the present day? It is very difficult to answer these questions
for several reasons. First of all, it is not easy to define the concepts of Europe and
the World. The debates about the geographical, cultural, spiritual or political boundaries
of Europe are very well known. Does Russia belong to Europe, or not? And what
about Turkey? As a result of the emergence of the European Union as a new political
and economic entity, the political leaders and the representatives of different professions
were forced to define the boundaries and the concept of Europe. This was also
true for the historical profession, the representatives of which had to realize that it is an
extraordinarily difficult task. It is not easy to determine the boundaries of Europe in a
given moment of time, but it is even more difficult to describe the historical changes of
the concept of “Europeanness” during long periods of human history. In ancient times
for example, the “civilized world” also contained territories which belonged to other
continents than Europe in the geographical sense of the word. And vice versa, some regions
we consider the integral part of Europe in every sense of the word belonged to the
barbaricum for the inhabitants of ancient Greece or the Roman Empire. The territories
of present day Syria or Tunisia were much more familiar for an educated Roman citizen
than the wild forests of Germania, not to mention Scandinavia, or the territory of the
present day Baltic states or Ireland. The concept of Europe as we know it, was absolutely
absent, and this was also true for the medieval ages when the concept of “Christianity”
substituted it.
It is not the task of this introduction to formulate the final verdict about the historical
definition of Europe. I would simply like to call the attention to the fact that the
definition of Europe determines what is not Europe at the same time. Historically, Europe
is a fluid category and, as a result, this is also true for the “world outside Europe”.
The boundaries of Europe have been changing in history and there are frontier regions,
which were considered the part of Europe in a given period of history, and belonged
to the “world outside Europe” in another. But in one way or another, the definition of
the boundaries and the concept of Europe always contain the elements of inclusion and
exclusion. We might classify a country, a region, a culture, a nation or a religion as un-
European because we deem it different from the concept of Europe we have in mind at
a given moment of time. It means that the definition of “Europeanness” automatically
determines the concept of Europeans about “otherness”. The two concepts could not
exist without each other. In this sense, the historical relationship between Europe and
the “world outside Europe” is the history of the constant definition of the concepts of
“Europeanness” and “otherness”, but in several ways. That is, not only Europeans con-

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ceptualized the characteristics of “Europeanness”, but so did the representatives of the
“world outside Europe”, who encountered Europeans in one way or another. For them,
Europeans represented “the others”, and when they struggled with the characterization
of “Europeanness”, they invented the definition of “otherness” in reference to themselves.
When Europeans and the representatives of the “world outside Europe” encountered
each other both parties started to formulate the concepts of “otherness”, and it
was not easy for either of them to decipher the formulations of their counterpart.
The case of Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490-1557), the 16th century Spanish soldier is a good
example. De Vaca was the treasurer and the second-in-command of the expedition of
Panfilo de Narváez (c. 1478-1528) to discover and conquer Florida and the lands beyond
in 1528. But the fierce resistance of the Apalachee Indians of Northern Florida
forced the conquistadors to retreat to the coast where the Spanish constructed five
barges to coast around the Gulf of Mexico. They were shipwrecked on the coast of
present day Texas, and most of the conquerors soon died of disease, exposure, and malnutrition.
The surviving few became the slaves of the Karankawa Indians. This was the
total reversal of the original roles, and interestingly enough eventually the four surviving
conquistadors became the magical healers of the natives, who assumed that only
they possessed the power to cure the deadly new illnesses associated with the arrival of
the Spaniards. One band of Indians passed the healers on to the next group, and in this
way they moved westward across Texas and New Mexico into northwestern Mexico,
where they were “liberated” by Spanish slavers. As a result of his experiences among the
Indians de Vaca internalized many of the values of the natives and started to view his
former role as conquistador from a different angle. He saw his “liberators” with the eyes
of the natives when he noted in one of his writings that “We healed the sick, they killed
the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted
nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found”. As
Alan Taylor noted, in the narrative of de Vaca “the they described his own past as well as
the immediate slavers, for in them he saw what he had been eight years before in Florida
with a sword in hand, destroying Apalachee villages” 1 .
But only a few Europeans went through the same experiences and most of the Europeans
encountering “the others” did not realize the other side of the coin. In most cases, mutual
understanding of the perception of “otherness” proved to be very difficult between Europeans
and the representatives of the “world outside Europe” for most of the five centuries
after the “great explorations”. The sixth thematic workgroup of CLIOHRES.net
project is dedicated to the study of the historical connections between Europe and the
rest of the World, and one of the fundamental aims of this co-operation is the promotion
of mutual understanding of “otherness” among Europeans and the representatives
of the “world outside Europe”, through the study of history. Fifteen eminent staff members
and eleven doctoral students represent ten European and one African university in
the thematic workgroup. We have members from northwestern (University of Iceland,
Ghent University, National University of Ireland, Galway, University of Sussex), southern
(University of Deusto, Bilbao, University of Valencia, Portuguese Open University,

Introduction XV
Lisbon), and eastern Europe (University of Debrecen, University of Maribor, Moscow
State Regional University), while Africa is represented by the University of KwaZulu
Natal (Durban, South Africa). The staff members and the doctoral students have very
different backgrounds and fields of interest. But it is a common characteristic of all of
them that, in one way or another, they are dedicated to the research and understanding
of the extremely complex historical relationship of Europe and the “world outside Europe”.
CLIOHRES.net is a five-year project and we hope that by the end of this period
our group will develop a sophisticated and well-organized co-operation dedicated to the
research of certain aspects of the historical relations of Europe and the rest of the World.
We are still at the beginning of this process, but we have made the first steps towards the
above-mentioned goal. We have finished the first year of the project, the fundamental
task of which was the mapping and exploration of current definitions, problems and approaches
regarding “Europe and the World” in national historiographies. This volume
is the result of this “mapping and exploration”.
Very different countries with very different historical and historiographical traditions
are represented in this thematic workgroup. One can find real great powers in it with
long-standing imperial and maritime traditions (Great Britain, Spain, Russia), smaller
countries, which once were the cores of their own imperial structures (Portugal, Belgium),
Atlantic and African countries, which were the parts of larger empires for significant
periods of their history (Iceland, Ireland, South Africa), and East Central European
regions, which belonged to European continental empires for centuries (Hungary,
Slovenia). Due to their different geographical positions and historical past the intensity
and the characteristics of their relationship with the “world outside Europe” was also
very different. The Vikings departing from Iceland were playing a leading role in the
early European discovery of Greenland and North America in the 10th century. Spain,
Great Britain and Russia were the cores of large empires including extensive non-European
territories. Portugal and Belgium were much smaller countries, but they could
establish their own extensive empires outside Europe. Ireland and South Africa became
part of the British Empire and as a result both of them had intense relations with the
“world outside Europe” on the one hand, and with the Old Continent on the other. In
the case of these countries the relevance of the study of the historical contacts between
Europe and the “world outside Europe” is clear and well established from the point of
view of their historiography. But this is not unequivocal in the case of such countries as
Hungary and Slovenia, the geographical position of which prevented them from playing
any significant role in the expansion of Europe after the 15th century. But this does
not mean at the same time that the history of the relationship of Europe and the rest of
the world is totally irrelevant for the historians of these countries. For centuries, both of
them constituted parts of the Habsburg Empire which was one of the major players in
European great power politics. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Habsburgs also ruled
the Spanish Empire and as a result, the conflicts of the European maritime empires such
as Britain, France or Spain also inevitably affected the Eastern or Danubian Habsburg
Empire, including the historical Hungarian Kingdom and the regions inhabited by the

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Slovenes. And in some periods of their history more direct connections were also established
between Eastern Europe and the “world outside Europe”. The peoples of this
European region constituted the most important element among the immigrants to the
United States of America between 1903 and 1913, for example. All the nations of the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy took part in the migratory phenomenon, including the
Hungarians and the Slovenes.
The chapters of this volume mirror the differences of these distinct traditions of historiography.
All contributions discuss the historiography of a special topic relating to
the history of Europe and the “world outside Europe”. Since the interests of the staff
members and the doctoral students contributing to this volume are very different, we
decided to arrange the chapters according to the continents involved in the historical
relations with Europe which they study. The first part contains three chapters, which
were not classifiable in this way, since they relate to the historical relationship of Europe
with more than one continent, or in a more general manner. Anna Agnarsdóttir (staff
member, University of Iceland) provides a summary of Iceland’s interesting and not
very well known relations with the “world outside Europe”, which in the case of this relatively
isolated island practically meant everything outside itself. Matjaz Klemenčič and
Danijel Grafenauer (staff member and doctoral student, University of Maribor) show
us how the history of the world outside Europe has been taught in a small East Central
European country with relatively weak traditions in this field. Victor N. Zakharov (staff
member, Moscow State Regional University) discusses the development of historiography
on Western European merchants in Russia in the 18th century, a very relevant
topic from the point of view of Europe and the world, since this was the period of the
emergence of Russia as a multi-continental empire. And the last chapter of part one
was composed by Emilio Saenz-Francés San Baldomero (doctoral student, University
of Deusto Bilbao) who explores the complicated foreign relations of Spain towards the
world outside Europe during World War II on the basis of some new documentation.
Part two contains three studies on the historical contacts between Europe and Africa.
Two Belgian scholars struggle with the inheritance of their country’s colonial past. Guy
Vanthemsche summarizes the different trends of Belgian historiography regarding the
country’s colonizing activities in Congo, while Geert Castryck (doctoral student, Ghent
University) focuses on the “home front” and studies the manifestations of the colonial
past in Belgium’s public sphere. The author of the third study about Africa is Donal
McCracken (staff member, University Kwa-Zulu Natal), who discusses the complex
interdependence of South Africa’s African and European historical inheritance in the
historiographical tradition of the country.
Part three is about the relationship of Europe and Asia and contains four studies. Attila
Bárány (staff member, University of Debrecen) calls the attention of the historical
profession to the not very well-known role that Hungary and some Hungarian kings
played in the history of Crusades. Vinita Damodaran (University of Sussex) explores
how the British perceived and constructed at the same time the different races and
tribes in India during the 19th century. Ana Paula Avelar (staff member, Aberta Uni-

Introduction XVII
versity) reveals how the newly explored Asian territories were depicted and interpreted
in 16th century Portuguese historiography. And in the last study of part three Gábor
Demeter (doctoral student, University of Debrecen) summarizes the debates about
domestic and foreign politics in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th
century from a historiographical point of view.
The concluding section is about the relationship of Europe and the American continent
and comprised four studies, two about Europe and Latin America, and two about Europe
and North America. In respect of Latin America, Mary N. Harris (Staff member
National University of Ireland, Galway) surveys the perception of Irish-Latin American
contacts in Irish historiography, while Maria Alexandra Gago da Câmara (staff member,
Aberta University) explores the mutual impact of baroque art in Portugal and Brazil.
Regarding the historical contacts of Europe and North America István Kornél Vida
(doctoral student, University of Debrecen) provides an overview of the historiography
of Hungarian emigration to the United States of America after the Hungarian Revolution
and War for Independence in 1848-1849, and Csaba Lévai (staff member, University
of Debrecen) summarizes the evaluation of the American Revolution in Hungarian
historiography during the decades after World War II.
Due to the very different special fields of the members of our workgroup this volume
provides only a first approach to the extremely complex historical interdependence of
Europe and the “world outside Europe” and the ways that historiography in different
contexts has approached the issue. Nevertheless, we hope that our volume genuinely
represents some recent trends of historiography concerning the relationship of Europe
and the rest of the world, and serves the fundamental aim of our workgroup: the promotion
of the mutual understanding of “otherness” from a historical perspective.
Csaba Lévai
University of Debrecen
Note
1
Cabeza De Vaca is quoted by A. Taylor, American Colonies, New York 2001, p. 70.