Conclusion

At the end of the last millennium, the Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam published an essay now widely considered the foundation stone of connective global history. 1 It started with a critical discussion of some grand syntheses of global ambition like those of Victor Lieberman, André Wink, Kirthi Chaudhuri, and Christopher Bayly. Since then, their macro approach to global problems had lost quite some steam, partly due to Subrahmanyam’s own insistence on studying the micro-level, advice that many scholars in the field of global history and area studies have taken to heart in the decades that followed. 2 However, since Subrahmanyam also warned against the parochialism of area studies, the result could only be the study of globally connected micro-histories. Or to use the words of Subrahmanyam himself, ‘we cannot attempt a “macro-history” of the problem without muddying our boots in the bogs of “micro-history”’. The connective ingredient in that seminal 1997 article was sixteenth- century commensurability in millenarianism, which Subrahmanyam linked with the notion of the ‘early modern’, the result of ‘a changed domain of global interaction that has to do with such diverse matters as the legacy of Chinggis Khan and Timur, the Counter Reformation and its overseas drive to proselytise, as well as the so-called Voyages of Discovery’. In the previous pages, we have directly or indirectly revisited these themes from the point of view of Neoplatonism, a Great Tradition that, grosso modo, covered the same territories as Subrahmanyam’s. Which new insights did we gain from this exercise of longue-durée global intellectual history?