In Other Words: Decentring Histories of Society and Culture (c. 1450-1750)

Categories and assumptions underlying conventional narratives of European history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries continue to affect scholarly interpretations of social institutions and constructs at large. The paper provides an opportunity to challenge the ethnocentric premises of these narratives. It does so by focusing on a set of attitudes and practices that have been obscured by understandings of the archive, law, religion, race, and slavery in predominant if not exclusive European terms and the idea that these formed the basis or were the product of western distinctiveness. Although these terms cover a varied and vast range of human interaction, their reduction to specific standards and trajectories has been detrimental to European and global history alike.

Taking a hands-on approach, the paper addresses the following interrelated questions in specific contexts across a wide geography, from the Atlantic world to Inner Asia, China, Japan, and the shores of the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Africa: How did different societies and cultures create and preserve records? What norms regulated their members’ behaviours and choices? What kind of relationship did they establish with the sacred? On what grounds did some people differentiate themselves from others? To what extent did this inform the nature of their enslaving practices? Addressing these issues will allow students to rethink social institutions and constructs that negotiated the great transformations that occurred during an age of expanding empires and world religions, increased mobility and long-distance trade.

The paper emphasises the importance of decentring the vocabulary of European history and question its application to other regions of the world as a fundamental way to reimagine how scholars can approach and interpret significant manifestations of convergence, overlapping, interaction, dissimilarity, and isolation across societies and cultures. This exercise will benefit students of European and global history alike, as it highlights why, as historians, we need to be aware of the words we use.