Journal of World History

Historical interest in cultural circulation and exchange has increased in the 2000s. In recent years, this interest in the “globalization” of cultures has also spread to the specialized field of art history, which has seen a proliferation of writings on “world art history,” “global art history,” and the worldwide spread of the discipline of art history itself. In this emerging field of comparative historical studies in the visual arts, the volume Circulations in the Global History of Art stands out with its determined rejection of the nation as the privileged unit of analysis and its cogent emphasis on processes and connections among cultures.

As the title suggests, the book’s leading concept is “circulation.” The introduction by editors Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, all leading scholars of global art history, provides a substantial account of the historical background of the recent explorations of circulation in global art history. The book brings together the work of historians and art historians from the United States, France, Germany, and Poland, thus presenting a broad range of Western approaches. It includes specialized case studies of different periods, regions, and objects, and covers a variety of methodological and historiographical issues related to circulation and globalization. In his illuminating discussion of the historiography pertaining to global and world art history, Kaufmann traces how much of the early methodology for the study of intercultural artistic circulation was rooted in the discipline of history, specifically German Historicism of the nineteenth century and the work of the French Annales School in the twentieth century. The book also links the two disciplines by including chapters by three historians who have contributed significantly to the development of new approaches to history in the context of a postcolonial, globalized world, such as Entangled or Global History and Transnational History: Michel Espagne, Serge Gruzinski, and Christophe Charle.

The subsequent chapters demonstrate how circulatory approaches may help us revise the usual frames and tropes of (art) historical narratives. Even if the authors take most of their empirical examples from the histories of the fine and applied arts, their revisionist approaches may also inspire historians working with (visual) historical documents and intercultural comparative perspectives in other fields, because the contributors all insist on the inseparable bond between theory and [End Page 172] methodological self-reflection, on the one hand, and the practice of historical analysis, on the other.

The strong emphasis on history in this book is a much-needed anti-dote to the pervasive presentism in global art studies, which holds that we live in the first truly global age—a presentism that is partly explained by the fact that much current debate relates to contemporary art. Kaufmann rightly insists on globalizing moments before circa 1800 and on the fact that art has always depended on trade, markets, and conquest for dissemination of objects over distances and for cultural transfer, appropriation, and assimilation in other geopolitical contexts. As Espagne observes in his impressive historical overview, there are many important examples of this, such as the Silk Road, the Portuguese spice route, and Constantinople as a commercial “contact zone” between Turkey and Europe, Christian and Muslim cultures.

One of the principal causes of globalization before circa 1800 is of course colonization. In his illuminating chapter on the worldwide diffusion of art and culture from Spain, Portugal, and, to a lesser extent, Italy between the late Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity, Gruzinski convincingly argues that the idea of “Western” art was born in translation, so to speak. The notions of “Western” art, philosopy, and culture were products of colonial encounters with other cultures, suggests Gruzinski: “A ‘Western’ art began to beat out a path for itself, starting from the workshops opened in Mexico, Lima, Quito, Gao, and Nagasaki” (p. 51). In other words, “Western” art emerged with the distribution and adaptation of European cultural products and...