PART I Escaping from National Narratives:The New Global History in China and Japan -- Global History, the Role of Scientific Discovery and the ‘Needham Question’: Europe and China 16th to 19th Centuries -- Encounter and Co-existence: Portugal and Ming China 1511-1610 - Rethinking the Dynamics of a Century of Global-Local Relations -- Challenging National Narratives: On the Origins of Sweet Potato in China as Global Commodity during the Early Modern Period -- Economic Depression and the Silver Question in Nineteenth-Century China -- Kaiiki-shi and World/Global History: A Japanese Perspective -- PART II Trade Networks and Maritime Expansion in East Asian Studies -- Structure and Transformation of the Ming Tribute Trade System -- Nanban Trade and Shuinsen Trade in 16th and 17th Century Japan -- The Jewish Presence in China and Japan in the Early Modern Period: A Social Representation -- Quantifying Ocean Currents as Story Models: Global Oceanic Currents and their Way into Global Navigation -- PART III Circulation of Technology and Commodities in the Atlantic and Pacific -- Global History and the History of Consumption: Congruence and Divergence -- Mexican Cochineal, Local Technologies and the Rise of Global Trade (16th-19th centuries) -- Social Networks and the Circulation of Technology and Knowledge in the Global Spanish Empire -- Global Commodities in Early Modern Spain -- Big History as a Commodity at Chinese Universities: A Study in Circulation.

Open Access

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. Rethinking the ways global history is envisioned and conceptualized in diverse countries such as China, Japan, Mexico or Spain, this collections considers how global issues are connected with our local and national communities. It examines how the discipline had evolved in various historiographies, from Anglo Saxon to southern European, and its emergence in Asia with the rapid development of the Chinese economy motivation to legitimate the current uniqueness of the history and economy of the nation. It contributes to the revitalization of the field of global history in Chinese historiography, which have been dominated by national narratives and promotes a debate to open new venues in which important features such as scholarly mobility, diversity and internationalization are firmly rooted, putting aside national specificities. Dealing with new approaches on the use of empirical data by framing the proper questions and hypotheses and connecting western and eastern sources, this text opens a new forum of discussion on how global history has penetrated in western and eastern historiographies, moving the pivotal axis of analysis from national perspectives to open new venues of global history.