This essay aims to reconstruct the epistemological and ethical-political premises, as well as the most essential categorial core, of a conceptualization of the «global past» as legitimate subject-matter for specialized scientific research that has emerged in the thought and practice of several groups of professional historians over the last four decades in the context of the coeval revival and renewal of World History. Subscribing to some form or another of pluralist cosmopolitanism, these scholars regard it as their professional duty to produce a genealogy of the globalized present centered on the long-term dynamic interactions and connections between major regional civilizations and the morphological changes which the multicultural «human community» shaped by civilizational encounters has undergone through the centuries and the millennia up to contemporary pammixia. While indebted to earlier 20thcentury attempts to ground hopes of a future ecumenical society in a universally shared common past, the new global historians have clearly distanced themselves from their predecessors’ more or less explicit holistic and teleological assumptions, emphasizing instead the persistence of Eurasian polycentrism even in the epoch of Western expansion and ascendancy, the hybrid character of its cultural legacy to the present, the vast and manifold opportunities for mutual accommodation that the global interactions have thus bequeathed to the identity groups destined to coexisting and conflicting in the today’s hyperconnected world.

 Historiography; Globalization in World History; Multiple Modernities; Colonial and Agrarian Empires; Contemporary Polycentrism; Pluralist Cosmopolitanism.

DOI

10.53129/gcsi_02-2023-09