Cross-Cultural Comparison in Times of Increasing Transregional Connectedness: Perspectives From Historical Sciences and Area Studies on Processes of Respatialization

Abstract

In this article, I follow the history of debates about cross-cultural comparison within the historical disciplines and the social sciences and argue that, depending on the historical context, such comparisons are related to the study of entanglements in one way or the other. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, comparative history was the subject of sharp criticism while comparison remained a prominent and widely undisputed method in the social sciences. This can be explained by the different ways in which historians and social scientists react to the debate about globalization. In the meantime, within the disciplines of history, the harsh opposition between Vergleich [comparison] and Verflechtungsanalyse [the study of entanglements] has made room for a series of innovative approaches to combine them in a reflexive way.