A historian studying the decline of medieval Mediterranean trade wants to use 'global history' methodology. Which approach best fits that method?
ACompare the Mediterranean to another isolated trading region to find structural parallels in how trade systems collapse
BFocus on the most dominant city-state in the Mediterranean to understand the whole system from the inside out
CTrace how the Mediterranean trading system was connected to and affected by other regions — Indian Ocean, Northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa — through movements of goods, people, and ideas
DWrite a national history of each Mediterranean country, then assemble the accounts into a composite picture
Global history asks 'what was linked?' rather than 'what was similar?' It traces connections, circulations, and entanglements across political borders rather than comparing separate cases or working within a single unit. Option A describes comparative history (structural parallels across cases). Option D is the national-frame approach that global history specifically aims to escape. Global history insists that the Mediterranean trade decline cannot be understood in isolation from its connections to other trading systems that were simultaneously shifting.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
Barrington Moore compared how England, France, Germany, Japan, and India experienced modernization to develop a theory of paths to democracy and authoritarianism. What is the primary methodological danger in this comparative approach?
AUsing too many cases dilutes the causal argument, since each case introduces additional variables
BSelecting cases specifically because their outcomes support the thesis rather than sampling all possible outcomes — confirmation bias built into the case selection
CComparing countries of different sizes and populations makes causal inference statistically impossible
DComparative history requires complete quantitative data, which is unavailable for most historical periods
Selection bias is the core methodological danger in comparative history: if you choose cases that already confirm your theory, you haven't tested it — you've illustrated it. Moore chose cases that covered the major outcome types (democracy, fascism, communism), which mitigated but did not eliminate this risk. Option A is wrong — multiple cases are a strength, not a weakness. Option C conflates historical comparison with regression analysis. Option D is wrong — comparative history often uses qualitative evidence, and absence of quantitative data doesn't invalidate the method.
Question 3 True / False
Much so-called 'global history' is criticized for still having an implicit European center, even when it aims to tell a genuinely planetary story.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is one of the field's most searching self-criticisms. Even historians who explicitly aim to decentered global history tend to frame questions around European developments — asking why industrial capitalism emerged in England rather than China still takes European industrialization as the reference point. The choice of which connections to trace, which archives to privilege, and which actors to foreground all involve implicit centering decisions. Truly decentered global history — written equally from, say, a West African or Southeast Asian vantage point — remains methodologically difficult and relatively rare.
Question 4 True / False
Comparative history and global history ask the same fundamental question; they differ primarily in the scale of the cases they study.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
The two methods ask genuinely different questions. Comparative history asks 'what was similar or different across cases?' — it places cases side by side to develop and test causal arguments about structural conditions. Global history asks 'what was connected?' — it traces the actual flows, movements, and entanglements that crossed borders and shaped multiple societies simultaneously. A comparative study of the French and Russian Revolutions asks why similar conditions produced similar outcomes; a global history study of those revolutions would ask how Atlantic abolitionist ideas, commodity markets, and Enlightenment print culture linked them. Scale is the least important difference.
Question 5 Short Answer
What is the difference between comparative history and global history as methods, and what kind of question does each approach ask?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Comparative history places two or more cases side by side to ask why similar conditions produced different outcomes (or different conditions similar ones) — it seeks structural explanations through controlled comparison. Global history traces connections, circulations, and entanglements across borders to ask how movements of people, ideas, goods, and diseases shaped multiple societies simultaneously — it seeks to recover links that national or local narratives suppress.
The distinction matters because it determines what evidence you need and what claims you can make. Comparative history depends on case selection and can fall into selection bias. Global history depends on tracing actual historical connections and can fall into treating all events as linked when some were genuinely independent. Both transcend national frameworks, but through different logics: comparison through structural parallels, global history through documented circulation.