Thinking the world in the ^17th century : an imperfect history

Appointed by presidential decree dated April 19, 2013, I delivered my opening lecture on November 28, entitled At the Origins of Global History. In this lecture, after a quick overview of historiographical trends over the long term, I proposed that the circulation of oral and written texts and materials during the ^16th, ^17th and ^18th centuries produced a general conjuncture that allowed a range of possibilities as to historical production on a global scale. I have chosen a series of concrete examples to illustrate my point. In a recent book, Clio and the Crown, the American historian Richard Kagan has sketched out an overall vision for medieval and early modern Spain, ranging from simple chorographies to the globalizing imperial chronicle of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas. For Elizabethan England, we can contrast Raphael Holinshed's very national history with the global vision of a Richard Hakluyt, or even Sir Walter Raleigh'sHistory of the World, a text left unfinished when the author was put to death in 1618 (and discussed in a recent book by Nicholas Popper). To take one last case, I've returned to a context that's very familiar to me, that of the Mughal Empire in India in the late ^sixteenth and early ^seventeenth centuries.