Global History is a key field in the twenty-first century. It assumes that the characteristic frames of historical study, the nation or empire, for example, are effects of processes which connect (or disconnect) different communities of experience in time and space.

King’s History has a strong cluster of scholars who practice global history.

Professor David Edgerton is currently writing a global history of production; Professor Richard Drayton has developed a project connecting European oceanic empires to Europe’s hinterlands between 1500-1800; Professor Jon Wilson’s global history of the nation state will be published in 2025; Professor Sarah Stockwell most recent work traced how global processes of decolonisation affected the British state.

These and other scholars understand these processes of trans-national connection and disconnection with a comparative and connected approach. Through comparison, they presumes that phenomena in any one 'container' of history can be understood through rigorous modes of juxtaposition with others, either in other places, in the same historical conjuncture, or to other times. The connective approach seeks to make sense of how historical phenomena, such as the Scientific Revolution, were constituted across several spaces within the same historical conjuncture. Both of these methods can be put to work at many scales of historical experience, it is not a question of only paying attention to high level processes. Indeed, exponents of global history at King’s often engage with a micro-historical approaches, reaching down to particular idiosyncratic figures, or charismatic objects, texts, or ideas, or local situations, to map global trajectories. As an approach, it may even simply address one aspect of society, assessing how global influences left traces on local experience.

The key assumption is not that large-scale phenomena are all that matters, but rather that we may illuminate past and present in new ways by recognizing that every crisis of historical experience is always contained within, connected to, or resonant with other conjunctures of the human predicament. It may guide us towards also thinking about how historicities, way of mapping time from past, to present, and future, differ across societies.

For an approach to the field see Richard Drayton and David Motadel, "The Futures of Global History", Journal of Global History, 2018, 13(1), pp 1-21