PS9

Global History in a Not-So-Global World

Mark Jarzombek
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA

In the last decade, global history has emerged as a new historical category, different in considerable ways from "world history" and from the even older notion of history as constituted by the European tradition-plus-China-and-India. Though all of this might seem a positive, I will argue that - globally speaking - the emergence of an interest in global history is countermanded by the rise of Cultural Nationalism, an issue that is rarely addressed in architecture history circles. In this paper, I will discuss the issue of Cultural Nationalism and its ambiguous relationship to UNESCO's ever expanding Heritage List. I will argue that that in the heightened status of historical architecture, ‘global history' as we might generally understand it in academe is becoming more difficult to research than ever before.