Beyond a Westerncentric Historiography

Global Environment

A Subscribe-to-Open Journal

The thrice-yearly journal Global Environment: A Journal of Transdisciplinary History, now published by The White Horse Press, acts as a forum and echo chamber for ongoing studies on the environment and world history, with special focus on modern and contemporary topics. Our intent is to gather and stimulate scholarship that, despite a diversity of approaches and themes, shares an environmental perspective on world history in its various facets, including economic development, social relations, production government, and international relations.

One of the journal’s main commitments is to bring together different areas of expertise in both the natural and the social sciences to facilitate a common language and a common perspective in the study of history. This commitment is fulfilled by way of peer-reviewed research articles and also by interviews and other special features.

Global Environment strives to transcend the western-centric and ‘developist’ bias that has dominated international environmental historiography so far and to favour the emergence of spatially and culturally diversified points of view. It seeks to replace the notion of ‘hierarchy’ with those of ‘relationship’ and ‘exchange’ – between continents, states, regions, cities, central zones and peripheral areas – in studying the construction or destruction of environments and ecosystems.

Global Communication

The global history of the environment cannot limit itself to looking at how the western model asserted itself in the countries of the Global South; it also needs to study how this model merged with local experiences. The editorial board of the journal is composed, indeed, not only of researchers living and studying in Europe and North America but also of those from South America, Africa, Asia and Australia.

To be grounded in an authentic concept of integration, both politics and educational models require a knowledge of local historical experiences and the ways in which they blended with Western culture. This is knowledge that can only be attained through global communication. We need to transpose to the scientific plane the great merging of cultures that has long been underway as the result of globalisation in its various forms.

We need to give voice and space to historical experiences from the most remote regions of the globes, not just to represent the role played by the West in their transformation processes, but looking at them as autonomous and independent entities. We will strive to provide a medium for communication and discussion between scholars from very distant – culturally as well spatially – parts of the world, seeking to highlight the relationship between global phenomena and local factors.

Global Environment is indexed in Emerging Sources Citation Index

Subscribe to Open

For 2024 subscriptions, we are offering the journal on a Subscribe to Open basis, in the hope that we can publish the entire year's output fully Open Access at no cost to authors. Even if the journal remains gated under S2O, author fees would only apply if the author wishes to convert their own article to OA. For more information, please see our statement, here.