A Global History of East Central Europe

Looking at Central and Eastern Europe through the systematic application of transnational methods and from a truly global perspective can offer original and valuable insights. Central and Eastern Europe has tended to be a semi-peripheral area in the global scheme of things, and it has thus been much closer to the global average than some of the parts of the world on which much of recent global historiography has focused. Central and Eastern European countries have also developed numerous and still underexplored intercontinental connections outside the Western core that should be of special interest in our age of multipolarity. At the same time, it can be assumed that this diverse area, as a peripheral part of Europe in a formerly largely Eurocentric world. The global history of the region is not intended to exaggerate the role Central and Eastern Europe played in transcontinental processes in the last millennia. It rather aims to show how the diverse people of the region have come to be interconnected with and shaped by phenomena originating in all the various parts of the globe, transnational and global trends that certainly have exerted a much greater impact on their country’s multifaceted history than the other way round.

The course does not intend to deconstruct national narratives as such. It attempts to substantially enrich such narratives and reconceptualize them for an age of manifold global interconnectedness. To put it differently, the words “East Central European” and “global” are equally significant parts of the course’s title. It aims to re-contextualize medieval and early modern histories of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland by looking at global processes in their regional context rather than looking at the region as an exceptional and distinct area. While the region has traditionally been described in scholarship as the periphery of Western Christianity, there has been little understanding of the region as an area with close ties towards the Eastern Mediterranean (Byzantium), towards Eastern Europe (towards the Ruses) and how global processes such as climate change, trade connections, political representation or artistic changes reached (and spread from) the region.