https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2489-9861
![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
How have intellectuals from around the world thought about inequality in the world? In light of the call for a less Eurocentric history of ideas as well as recent debates about global inequality, this article introduces a special issue on the global intellectual history of an unequal world. The issue supplements the already available scholarship in at least four ways: it delves further into other kinds of inequalities than first and foremost economic inequality; it historicises key concepts in the intellectual history of an unequal world; it incorporates fine-grained analysis of indigenous languages and concepts; it extends the analysis of historical inequality vocabularies to how inequalities were critiqued. Moreover, this introduction sheds lights on possible methodological approaches for an intellectual history of global inequality. There is a need to go against a modular approach to the history of ideas to embrace the dialectic between the specific situatedness of our topics of research and ‘global’ contexts. Questions of transfer, circulation, connections, or diffusion of ideas need to be asked on an empirical case to case basis. We therefore propose location, temporality and legitimisation/critique as key analytical concepts when exploring historical thinking on an unequal world.
Acknowledgements
For comments on this article, we would like to thank Priyanka Jha, Philip Altmann, and the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Global Intellectual History. We would also like to thank all participants at our June 2021 online symposium Towards a Global Intellectual History of an Unequal World, 1945-Today.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Wallerstein, “The Present State,” 12.
2 Ibid., 16.
3 Stråth, “Global Conceptual History”; Schulz-Forberg, “Introduction: Global Conceptual History”; Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History.
4 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind.
5 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 210.
6 McClure, “Connected Global Intellectual History,” 7.
7 Ibid., 2, 4, 7.
8 Herbjørnsrud, “Beyond Decolonizing”.
9 Parts of the following section draws upon Christiansen and Jensen, “Histories of Global Inequality: Introduction” which offers a comprehensive overview of the state of the art on global inequality studies, including its history.
10 McMichael et al., “Global Environmental Change”; Roberts, “Global Inequality”; Shachar, The Birthright Lottery; Unterhalter, “Global Inequality, Capabilities”; Seekell, D’Odorico, and Pace, “Virtual Water Transfers”; Hurrell, “Global Inequality”; Galbraith, “Global Inequality”; Ghose, “Global Inequality”; Cheng and Yang, “Global Interaction, Global Inequality”.
11 Atkinson, Inequality; Piketty, Capital; Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality; Milanovic, Global Inequality.
12 Savage, The Return of Inequality; Burawoy, “Facing an Unequal World”; Holton, Global Inequalities; Neckerman and Torche, “Inequality”; Walby, Globalization and Inequalities; McGill, Global Inequality; Beitz, “Does Global Inequality Matter?”; Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level.
13 Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality”; Zanden et al., “The Changing Shape”; Therborn, The Killing Fields; Deaton, The Great Escape; Piketty, Capital; Prashad, The Poorer Nations; Scheidel, The Great Leveler; Beckert, Empire of Cotton. Christiansen and Jensen, Histories of Global Inequality.
14 Sen, Inequality Reexamined; Ramos Pinto, “Inequality by Numbers”.
15 On the call for international and global intellectual and conceptual history, see, in a growing literature (and beyond contributions to this journal), e.g. Armitage, McMahon, and Moyn, “The International Turn in Intellectual History”; Gänger and Lewis, “Forum”; Grafton, “The History of Ideas”; Grafton, “Forum: A World of Ideas”; Kelley, “Intellectual History in a Global Age”; Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History; Mulsow, “New Perspectives on Global Intellectual History”; Pernau, “Whither Conceptual History?”; Rotschild, “Arcs of Ideas. International History and Intellectual History”; Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History; Sartori, “Intellectual History and Global History”; Sluga, “Turning International”; Stråth, “Towards a Global Conceptual History”; Koselleck and Richter, “Introduction and Prefaces to the “Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe””; McGill, Global Inequality, 5.
16 Dann, “Gleichheit”.
17 For a study of Rousseau’s Discours sur … see Konoval, “Between Aristotle and Lucretius”; Sonenscher, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Foundations of Modern Political Thought”. On Arthur de Gobinau see Kale, “Gobineau, Racism, and Legitimism”. And on inequalities on nation state setting see Thompson, The Politics of Inequality.
18 Botana, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, 26–27.
19 Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity.
20 “Just 8 Men”.
21 Abrahamian, “Inequality Industry”.
22 Standing, The Precariat; Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction; Klein, This Changes Everything; Mezzadri, The Sweatshop Regime.
23 Hickel, The Divide; Hickel, “A Letter”.
24 Moyn, Not Enough.
25 Sen, Poverty and Famines.
26 Runciman, “What Time Frame”.
27 Chancel and Piketty, “Global Income Inequality”.
28 Ittersum, Gottmann, and Mostert, “Writing Global”; Osterhammel, “Global History”.
29 Christiansen, “Making of Global Inequality”.
30 Condorcet, Condorcet, 126.
31 Ramos Pinto, “Inequality by Numbers”.
32 Appiah, The Lies That Bind.
33 Ifversen, “About Key Concepts,” 71.
34 (Connolly 1974; Reid-Henry 2015:73).
35 Guichon, “(Black) Neo-Colonialism”.
36 McClure, “Connected Global Intellectual History,” 6.
37 Schulz-Forberg, “Introduction: Global Conceptual History”.
38 Cooper, “Concept of Globalization”.
39 Ivaska, Cultured States.
40 Cooper, “How Global,” 283–284.
41 Koselleck, “Einleitung”; Koselleck, “Erfahrungsraum Und “Erwartungshorizont””; Schulz-Forberg, “Introduction: Global Conceptual History”.
42 Lepenies, “Modern Concept of Development”; Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity; Stuurman, “Beyond “Modern Equality.”,” 64.
43 Piketty, Capital; Scheidel, The Great Leveler; Savage, The Return of Inequality.
44 On this topic see Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity.
45 Amis, Munir, and Mair, “Institutions and Economic Inequality”; Wisman and Smith, “Legitimating Inequality”.
46 As demonstrated in a volume on the shifting historical semantics of ‘world’ by conceptual historians Helge Jordheim and Erling Sandmo. Jordheim and Sandmo, Conceptualizing the World.
47 Boele van Hensbroek, Political Discourses, 4.