The Borrowers

World history is at least as old as Herodotus and Thucydides, but self-conscious "global history" is a recent development in the academy. More than a hundred books with those words in the title have been published this century, up from a handful in the prior two decades and zero before that. At their best, such studies are able to see past the limits of national histories, exploring the interconnections and flows of people, goods, ideas, and events across time and space. As the German historian Jürgen Osterhammel has put it, they can illuminate "the relationship between general developments and regional variants," putting familiar stories in a new perspective.

"The Borrowers" is from the November/December 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs.

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