Comparative History and Cultural Transfers

The lecture will first explore some aspects of the history of comparison and its impact on concepts in modern historiography. Secondly, there will be an overview on approaches that address the history of connections and why they came to the fore over the past two decades. There are of course various variants of analyzing connections from entangled history and histoire croisee to the study of cultural transfers, metissage and acculturation. They are presented in their capacity to shed light on different aspects of global and/or transnational connectivity. As a sort of conclusion the lecture will discuss if comparison and the investigation of connections can go together or are rather exclusive as methods in today's historiography.