Dr. Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, born 1977.

Researcher at the Institute for Medieval Research, Division of Byzantine Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, since 2007; team leader of the research group "Byzantium & Beyond"

Lecturer at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna, since 2009 (http://www.univie.ac.at/byzneo)


BREAKING THE WALL BETWEEN GLOBAL AND LOCAL IN THE LONG TERM OF HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN HISTORY

Related video lecture: https://youtu.be/5oHxn1sypFs

Is there a path “back” to a “deglobalized”, less connected and less interdependent world? Over the last years, various voices, coming from national(ist) angles, but also critics of capitalism have envisioned such a reverse of globalisation – most recently intensified by the encounter with an unintended consequence of global connectivity in the shape of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Without doubt, via the “compression of time and space” through instantaneous digital communication and high-speed mobility of people and commodities, globalisation over the last decades has intertwined humanity at a new scale. But was their actually an epoch in recorded human history over the last five millennia during which wide ranging connections did only have minor or even no impact on dispersed living communities?

For periods ahead of the modern era, global connectivity is still often perceived as a gossamer layer linking elites or a small number of travellers such as Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta, while most locally restricted communities were barely touched. In my research (synthesised also in three monographs between 2018 and 2021), however, I have explored a remarkable diversity of paths through which the global affected the local since millennia – admittedly, via numerous intermediaries and with considerable time lags between regions, but with dramatic and enduring impacts.

For this purpose, I assembled an interdisciplinary toolkit with methods and concepts of history, social sciences, and digital humanities as well as complexity sciences, network theory, environmental studies, and social ecology. This results not in abstract constructions, but in new insights how global entanglements modified essential aspects of the living environments of individuals, local communities, and regional ecologies at the micro-level. To this end, alongside new findings of history, archaeology and natural scientific analyses of artefacts and sediments, I equally take narratives of ancient and medieval contemporaries seriously – as powerful orienting interpretations of entanglements among humans and between men and nature at their time.

The late antique transplantation of tools and know-how of silk production from China via Central Asia to the Mediterranean, for instance, not only created new commercial opportunities. It brought about changes of agricultural practices, landscaping, flora, and fauna, of the organisation of labour during the year and of daily routines, of the distribution of work within communities and families, modifying patterns of power and gender roles, and of consumption habits. Across wide distances, cognate communities of practice and experience emerged, even if barely aware of each other´s existence. Often generations after these mostly anonymous transfers, imaginative narrators tried to explain the faraway origins of these now established elements of their live world, creating stories of “globalisation” of their own.

These transfers and innovations, however, had similar unintended consequences as modern globalisation, though often several generations later. Imported and adapted agricultural practices possibly made communities more vulnerable to climate change or pathogens spreading from and between animals and humans. Modified demands, preferences of consumption and methods of production increased dependencies on networks of exchange and sensitivity vis-à-vis their disruption in the long run.

In short, there was no period in recorded human history during which the global did not affect the local, with many benefits, but also risks. The “good old times” of advocates of deglobalisation are a “utopia” to be found nowhere in real space or time.

Yet, in contrast to “big data” from the present age, which only covers decades at the best, the “long run” of premodern historical studies covers centuries and millennia. This evidence by far outperforms the “shot-termism” of present-day decision-makers. By rendering the walls between present and past porous from as many angles as possible, I intend to make it permeable for a more far-sighted perspective on the intertwinement between global and local dynamics.
Address: Institut für Mittelalterforschung
Abteilung für Byzanzforschung
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Hollandstraße 12-13/4
1020 Vienna, Austria