Keynote Lecture
Annual Workshop of the Vienna Global History Group (FSP Globalgeschichte)
"Temporalities in/and Global History"
University of Vienna, 8 June 2026
Abstract:
Global historians have typically considered time in terms of calendars, chronologies, or periodisation as conceived by scholars in both the past and the present. However, this approach largely neglects the widespread experience of historical actors, including the extent to which their perception of and attitudes towards the passing of time changed profoundly as a result of the marked increase in long-distance interactions from the fifteenth century onwards. The emergence of vast empires across the globe was central to this process, which they largely mediated. Taking a novel approach to the study of empires, this talk employs concepts such as timeliness and seasonality to illustrate the widely overlooked phenomenon of the intermittence of the global in the early modern world.
