Author: Carla Bocchetti.

The purpose of this volume is to instigate a new dialogue involving studies of ‘global history’, Africa and the Classics, as so far the Classics have been left out from recent advances in global history. The aim is to expose Classics to contemporary preoccupations about the use of the past in global history, whereby Classics begins to lose the privileged position it has enjoyed within European imperial culture. Africa has been chosen as the case study to illustrate not only the hybridity of the Classical past, but also the collapse of the model of the Classics as ‘universal history’. As such, the volume encompasses a list of contributions that are rarely seen together in a publication related to Classical history 1 .The relativisation of Classical history, no longer conceived of as the epitome of civilization 2 , provides an opportunity to deconstruct imperial epistemologies founded in/inspired by the ancient Classical world.Scholars who work in global history have spent a lot of time clarifying what global history is not. It is not world history, or universal history, it is not national history, nor simply comparative history 3 . So, what is global history? In recent work by Gerritsen and Riello focusing on global history, predominance is given to artifacts as a new way to narrate history through objects: “the way in which artifacts came to be powerful tools for the creation of global connections” 4 . They further argue that “the global turn transformed the way in which historians studied objects. They began to see the connected histories that led to the circulation of objects throughout the various parts of the world” 5 . In spite of their emphasis on the circulation of objects and their consumption, neither Classical ruins, nor ruins in general, have constituted part of Gerritsen and Riello’s investigations, and there is no a single article in their collected editions devoted to these phenomena. Although the recent book by McNeil and Riello 6 deals with the historical development of the idea of ‘luxury’ including Antiquity, their approach lacks an emphasis on the global connections of the Classical world as reformulated through European imperialism, and the broader epistemological positions these underwrote.