The challenges of producing a “global” journal

With the launch of its partnership with Cambridge University Press in 2017, the Annales became a “global” journal in the social and human sciences. To avoid falling into a “flaccid globalism,” however, we must reflect on the respective positions of the French and English editions. This is not just a question of the relation between the local and the global, but also and especially of the particularity and the universality of knowledge. Microhistory, which the journal has long accompanied, has explored the relevance of situatedness and its heuristic benefits. Unlike the “Annales school,” it has thus insisted on subjectivities rather than structures, concerned above all with the interplay of scales and the narrative resources that allow both historical actors and historians to broaden their horizons from the particular to the general and thus to form, as it were, a specific understanding of the world. This shift in knowledge production converges with the “reflexive turn” and the histoire-probleme approach associated with the Annales. The journal’s task is now to consider its own path toward the reflexive historiography of global history to capture the specific processes of the universalization of knowledge.