DISCOVERING LARGE CONTINENTAL EMPIRES: A HISTORIAN IN SEARCH OF SPACE

Adopting an autobiographical perspective, this essay explores changes in the writing and teaching of history over the past eight decades through the introduction of the comparative dimension and the interaction of history with the social sciences. Beginning with a personal account of an early encounter with history as storytelling, the essay recounts successive exposure as an undergraduate to the comparative history of revolutions and later as an assistant professor at Northwestern University to contrasting accounts of World history and modernization theory. The analysis then centers on heated controversies that raised serious questions over the bias of Eurocentrism in the history profession. In the next stage where personal and professional intellectual development coincided in the nineteen sixties at the University of Pennsylvania, the role of the social sciences assumes a growing importance. Revisions of Marx and Weber and insights from the Annales School provided powerful incentives to organize interdisciplinary seminars and collaborative publications. The site of the third stage is the Central European University in Budapest. Here a re-organzation of the history faculty and the history curriculum introduces the comparative study of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe as three interrelated regions. At the same time, a related personal research agenda focuses on frontiers as an ideal spatial concept for comparative history. This leads to a broader understanding of the need to apply the geo-cultural approach of the Annales School to space outside the traditional boundaries of Europe. A research project is designed that combines a comparative study of three interrelated spatial components retaining similar features over a longue duree : the imperial rule of five continental multi-cultural societies sharing frontiers, re-defined as complex, and entangled in a competition to incorporate and assimilate borderlands on their peripheries. The project has produced ‘three volumes commemorating a lifelong commitment to a search for historical synthesis.