The Tides of Global History

It seems the tide that was going out is already coming back in.During my time in graduate school, historians were trading in truffles for parachutes, which is to say, trading an interest in the smallest scale for the largest. 1 Microhistories were giving way to global histories that sought to make sense of a globalized world.Nevertheless, just as we have soured on globalism, so too global history.Global histories readily became, to borrow a line from David Damrosch, "culturally deracinated, philologically bankrupt, and ideologically complicit with the worst tendencies of global capitalism." 2 All the while, as the water went out and comes back in, I feel as though I have been standing still.I study a tideless sea, the sea in the middle.What can a Mediterraneanist learn from the ebbs and flows of Global History?For my own part, I chose the Mediterranean because it satisfied a fledgling disposition toward research that crossed national and disciplinary boundaries.I wanted to study a world where Jews, Christians, and Muslims met to trade goods and ideas, a history that seemed redemptive.But I never saw myself as doing world or global history but rather something akin to connected history. 3 With training in Latin and Arabic, my ambitions-I imagined-were less grand, grounded in the lived experience of the sea's denizens.The Mediterranean-or the western Mediterranean, to be exact-was a world within a world, one with narrower horizons.Somewhere between the local and the global, the individual and the collective, I was content to navigate the middle.The tides of global history have risen and fallen before.In the time of Goethe, Marx and Engels, or Rabindranath Tagore, world history meant something ambitious and optimistic.It signified the end of nationalism and imperialism, and the emergence of a new order, in which no language or nation dominated: "In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have commerce in every direction, universal interdependence of