ABSTRACT
In October of 2021, after well over a year of COVID-19-related travel restrictions imposed with unusual rigor by authorities in Italy, the two of us (Giancarlo Casale and Cyrus Schayegh) organized a modest one-day symposium at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.1 The event brought together nine PhD students and postdocs from our two institutions (the EUI and the Geneva Graduate Institute), all engaged in research in Middle Eastern history in a variety of periods and geographies, as well as three discussants, Malika Dekkiche (University of Antwerp), Ulrike Freitag (Freie Universität Berlin and Zentrum für Moderner Orient, Berlin), and Jan Hennings (Central European University). To be sure, global history is, in principle, a field created with the intention of pushing beyond Eurocentric understandings of history.3 Nonetheless, in practice it has faced increasing criticism for relying too much on Anglophone bodies of secondary literature and on primary sources mainly in Western languages, particularly English, in ways that are frequently at odds with the methodologies of area studies. [...]rather counterintuitively, the "global" perspective of global history has on the whole not resulted in the kind of deep engagement with non-Western sources and research practices that might disrupt the Eurocentric assumptions upon which traditional historiography has been constructed.4 For institutional reasons, the implications of this methodological challenge were felt particularly acutely by the two of us, both Middle East historians in graduate programs specifically focused on training in global and international history. [...]MENA offers an unusually rich spatial setting to think through, or rethink, historically contingent connections, and to propose new avenues of comparison.8 Second, as a region MENA itself is highly heterogeneous and self-evidently constructed, inviting complex thinking about the definitional role of "regions"-whether maritime or land-based, whether global or world or international or even subnational - as the basic building blocks of global history. [...]due to its physical proximity to Europe, MENA provides an ideal vantage point for "inverting the gaze" and challenging some basic Eurocentric assumptions still implicit in global approaches to history - including Europe's own status as a stable, geographically defined space distinct from other world regions.