Some scholars reach into the deep past, situating the inaugural moments of the era in the domestication of plants and animals by humans in the Middle East and Asia. Others look to the demographic collapse of Amerindian societies and the massive ecological changes wrought by European imperialism in the Americas and around the world in the long sixteenth century. Still others emphasize more recent global transformations, pointing to the environmental repercussions of fossil-fuel-dependent industrialization in Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, or the globalizing capitalist model that spread across the Global South in the postwar era.

Through in-depth discussion of discrete chronologies, this seminar asked participants to weigh how Anthropocene studies can benefit from a more sustained engagement with scholarship on global history. Participants discussed critiques of global history’s often implicit or explicit Eurocentrism, as well as its frequent reliance on teleological narratives of modernity, and considered how critical engagements with global historiography can be constructive to Anthropocene studies. Through collective discussions of assigned readings, presentations, and writing exercises, seminar participants had the opportunity to craft and re-examine questions, methodologies, and approaches that they are developing for their own research.