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Journal of Global History (2017), 12, pp.

303–318 © Cambridge University Press 2017


doi:10.1017/S174002281700016X

Circulation: reflections on
circularity, entity, and liquidity in
the language of global history*

Stefanie Gänger
Historical Institute, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Cologne, Germany
E-mail: sgaenger@uni-koeln.de

Abstract
‘Circulation’ is not only among the most widely used words in the language of global history; it
is also among the most erratically employed. Amorphous in its usages and protean in its
semantics, ‘circulation’ has come to describe any sort of movement: from circular movement
and passage along the vessels of closed systems to, paradoxically, open-ended, unidirectional
dissemination. This article asks how ‘circulation’ became prominent metaphorically in global
history; it seeks to understand the word’s appeal and the consequences of its ascendancy. It
argues that the popularity of ‘circulation’ is attributable to a merger of two of its qualities: its
seeming ‘untainted-ness’ and openness, on the one hand, and on the other, how its older,
medical and economic, meanings resonate in its usages, allowing it to convey a sense of entity
(independent existence) for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of directed-
ness, self-reliance, and ‘liquidity’ for the movements it describes.

Keywords circulation, diffusion, globalization, language of global history, liquidity

‘Circulation’ is currently one of the most widely employed words in the language of global
history and the history of globalization; it is commonly, even routinely used throughout the
field and beyond. Amorphous in its usages and protean in its semantics,1 in the jargon of many
students of globalization, both historical and present-day, ‘circulation’ has come to describe
virtually any sort of movement, transmission, or passage. As Philipp Sarasin and Andreas B.
Kilcher put it, from the 1990s it became a ‘catch-word for all kinds of processualities

* I thank my former colleagues from the research group ‘Global Processes’, funded by a Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz Award, at the University of Konstanz – Martin Rempe, Jan C. Jansen, Franz L. Fillafer, Boris Barth,
and Jürgen Osterhammel – for inspiring conversations about the language of global history, which prompted
me to write this article. I am also grateful to Andrea Hollington, Jan Eckel, Claude Markovits, Michael
Goebel, Roland Wenzelhuemer, Julia Scheibe, Meike Knittel, and Lena Wagner, as well as to the Journal’s
editors and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous drafts.
1 Peter Dear has referred to the concept of ‘circulation’ as ‘somewhat amorphous’. Peter Dear, ‘Historiography
of not-so-recent science’, History of Science, 50, 2012, p. 203.

303
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and transfers’.2 But, while many historians use ‘circulation’, only a few of them talk about
using it. Like other popular keywords in the language of global history and the history of
globalization – think only of ‘flow’ or ‘connectivity’ – ‘circulation’ is often employed ‘in a
nearly unaware fashion’, as Stuart A. Rockefeller put it in relation to ‘flow’, even in passing or
in an ancillary manner, ‘as if its use was so innocuous as to call for no special mention’.3 It is
generally acknowledged, and by now far beyond the precincts of linguistic theory and philo-
sophy, that words shape cognition, and vice versa; but practitioners of global history, even
though the field has long settled into acceptance and even prominence, still rarely engage in
methodological and theoretical debates on their own terminology.
This article asks how ‘circulation’ came ‘into vogue and become prominent metaphorically’ in
‘global’ history; 4 it seeks to comprehend the word’s temptation and appeal, as well as the
consequences of its ascendancy, in terms of both the risks it holds for the field and its qualities and
potential. To that end, the article examines uses of the word ‘circulation’ in global history schol-
arship written in the English language over the past few years, and traces the semantic changes
and the various historically given associations underlying them. The article relies on a wide body
of ‘primary sources’ to grasp current variation in uses of the term. Though global history
monographs are, of course, relevant to the discussion, in order to be able to systematize the range
of meanings that ‘circulation’ has assumed, the article primarily examines uses of the word in a set
number of issues in three journals: the Journal of World History, the Journal of Global History
(two of the foremost history journals to have embraced global and world history in recent dec-
ades), and, as a sort of cross-check, the history of science, medicine, and technology journal Isis.
In these journals, ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, occurred in 42%, 52%, and 37% of
the articles published between 2009 and 2016 respectively: in 63 of 150 articles in the Journal
of World History in the issues that came out between March 2009 and December 2016, and in
81 of 155 articles in the Journal of Global History in the issues that came out between March
2009 and November 2016. ‘Circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, was used somewhat more
sparingly in the journal Isis, where they occurred in 97 out of 260 articles in the issues that
came out between March 2009 and December 2016 – or fewer, were we to omit ‘focus’
sections dedicated to a new, global history of science, where ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circu-
late’, occurred in as many as 85% of the articles.5 In all three cases, reviews, front or back
matter texts, letters to the editor, editorial introductions, frontispieces, and similar material
were excluded from the count.6
Many global historians publish in languages other than English, and ‘circulation’ is widely
employed in much of the non-English-language global history scholarship. This article focuses
on English-language publications both for reasons of feasibility and because of English’s

2 Philipp Sarasin and Andreas B. Kilcher, ‘Editorial’, Nach Feierabend, 2001, p. 8. See also Monika Dommann,
‘Alles fließt: soll die Geschichte nomadischer werden?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 42, 2016, p. 530.
3 Stuart A. Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, Current Anthropology, 52, 4, 2011, pp. 558–9.
4 I take this phrase from Neil Safier, who asked in the American Historical Review discussion on the circulation
of information how ‘certain terms … come into vogue and become dominant metaphorically … in academic
culture, and what the temptations and pitfalls are in using them’. Paul N. Edwards et al., ‘AHR conversation:
historical perspectives on the circulation of information’, American Historical Review, 116, 5, 2011, p. 1412.
5 See the focus sections ‘Global histories of science’, Isis, 101, 1, 2010; ‘Global currents in national histories of
science: the “global turn” and the history of science in Latin America’, Isis, 104, 4, 2013; and ‘Bridging
concepts: connecting and globalizing history of science, history of technology, and economic history’, Isis,
106, 4, 2015, where circulation was used in eleven of thirteen articles.
6 In going over uses of the word in a set number of issues of a particular journal using a keyword search, I adopt
the approach applied by Stuart A. Rockefeller in his analysis of the keyword ‘flow’. Rockefeller, ‘Flow’.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 305 j

particular status as the field’s common language – in fact, the authors of several of the pub-
lications cited in the following are non-native speakers who have chosen to publish in English.
Relying on historical studies of the ‘circulation’ discourse in past societies,7 on scholarship
that makes the language of global history and the history of globalization its study,8 and on
studies of other popular keywords in the language of globalization – in particular, Stuart A.
Rockefeller’s remarkable 2011 article on the keyword ‘flow’, a critical discussion of anthro-
pologists’ use of the term – the article traces the varied denotations and connotations of
‘circulation’. It suggests that the word’s vicissitudes may ultimately be as pertinent as its present
ubiquity: its many meanings and associations evidently serve a purpose, though one largely
unacknowledged and, perhaps, unrecognized in the field. It argues that the popularity of
‘circulation’ may be attributable to how, in a merger of two of its qualities, its seeming
‘untainted-ness’ and openness, on the one hand, and on the other, the resonance of older,
medical and economic, meanings in its usages, it is able to convey a sense of entity, that is,
independent existence, for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of directedness,
self-reliance – that is, an evacuation of agency – and ‘liquidity’ for the movements it describes.

Old wine in a new bottle


Of the articles surveyed, 84% (that is, 53 out of 63 that use ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’,
in the Journal of World History and 68 out of 81 that rely on those terms in the Journal of
Global History) – deploy the word broadly as a synonym for transmission, spread, and dis-
semination, of anything from writings or persons to concepts or artefacts. Authors refer to the
‘circulation’ of books9 or of the ‘language of cosmopolitan theory’,10 of ‘the Heroic Guerilla
image and ideas associated with Che’,11 of ‘ideas between European colonial powers’,12 of
‘illuminated Koran manuscripts … in Sana’a’,13 or of stories ‘to London via Reuters agents in
St. Petersburg, Constantinople, Philippopolis, and Teheran’.14 In some of these references,
‘circulation’ explicitly takes the meaning of a linear, one-way passage: authors refer to ‘the
circulation of luxury goods toward the hinterland’,15 to how ideas about ‘rural reconstruction’
circulated ‘from New Deal agencies and US philanthropies to missionaries, nationalists, and

7 Practitioners in history as well as cultural studies have written about uses of the term ‘circulation’ in past
societies. See, for instance, Harald Schmidt and Marcus Sandl, eds., Gedächtnis und Zirkulation: der Diskurs
des Kreislaufs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002.
8 See, for instance, Frederick Cooper, ‘What is the concept of globalization good for? An African historian’s
perspective’, African Affairs, 100, 2001, pp. 189–213; Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Globalizations’, in Jerry H.
Bentley, ed., The Oxford handbook of world history, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 89–104;
Dommann, ‘Alles fließt’, pp. 526–32.
9 Mark Gamsa, ‘Cultural translation and the transnational circulation of books’, Journal of World History, 22,
3, 2011, p. 557.
10 Julia Horne, ‘The cosmopolitan life of Alice Erh-Soon Tay’, Journal of World History, 21, 3, 2010, p. 421.
11 Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘Resurrecting Che: radicalism, the transnational imagination, and the politics of heroes’,
Journal of Global History, 7, 3, 2012, p. 511.
12 Benoit Daviron, ‘Mobilizing labour in African agriculture: the role of the International Colonial Institute in
the elaboration of a standard of colonial administration, 1895–1930’, Journal of Global History, 5, 3, 2010,
pp. 479, 481, and 500.
13 Luís U. Afonso, ‘Patterns of artistic hybridization in the early protoglobalization period’, Journal of World
History, 27, 2, 2016, p. 223.
14 Gordon M. Winder, ‘London’s global reach? Reuters news and network, 1865, 1881, and 1914’, Journal of
World History, 21, 2, 2010, p. 288.
15 Bing Zhao, ‘Global trade and Swahili cosmopolitan material culture: Chinese-style ceramic shards from Sanje
Ya Kati and Songo Mnara (Kilwa, Tanzania)’, Journal of World History, 23, 1, 2012, p. 70.

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British colonial administrators’,16 or to how ‘what is forged at the periphery circulate(s) back to
the core’.17 ‘Circulation’ is employed in like manner in related fields, broadly with the meaning
of ‘dissemination’. In the journal Isis, in 78 out of 97 mentions, authors use the term to refer to
the ‘circulation’ of ‘stories’,18 of ‘new research findings’,19 of ‘a memorandum to federal patent
officials’,20 ‘of reagents, techniques, and researchers’,21 or of ‘metaphors and models’.22
Transmission, spread, and dissemination is, in fact, one literal meaning of ‘circulation’.
Around 1700, ‘circulation’ expanded semantically and came to denote ‘the transmission or
passage of anything’, from money to news, ‘from hand to hand, or from person to person’, and,
as the Oxford English dictionary states, ‘dissemination or publication, whether by transmis-
sion from one to another, or by distribution or diffusion of separate copies’.23 The manner in
which many global historians and their counterparts in related fields use ‘circulation’ is thus
essentially literal language, seemingly outside any figure of speech, and, superficially at least,
one that carries no theoretical, historical, or ideological weight.
The word’s apparent impartiality and innocuousness may well be an important part of its
appeal, especially since ‘circulation’ has occasionally come to replace more partial and less
innocent terms. At some points in the articles under consideration, ‘circulation’ is employed
virtually synonymously with what previous generations of historians would have referred to as
‘diffusion’. When authors refer, for instance, to how ‘ideas from abroad’ circulated in Latin
America,24 how management concepts and strategies ‘were circulated’ through American
‘migrant engineers’ ‘around the globe’,25 or how ‘the Chinese prison and penal reform in the
early twentieth century was part of a global circulation of Western institutions and practices
and signified China’s entry into the modern era’,26 one can hardly refrain from suggesting the
possibility that ‘circulation’ has, in some instances at least, replaced the term ‘diffusion’,
tainted, and discredited, by its association with Eurocentrism.27 Frederick Cooper once

16 Nicole Sackley, ‘The village as Cold War site: experts, development, and the history of rural reconstruction’,
Journal of Global History, 6, 3, 2011, p. 484.
17 Lynn Zastoupil, ‘“Notorious and convicted mutilators”: Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible’,
Journal of World History, 20, 3, 2009, p. 433.
18 Elizabeth A. Wilson, ‘“Would I had him with me always”: affects of longing in early artificial intelligence’, Isis,
100, 4, 2009, p. 844.
19 Soraya de Chadarevian, ‘The making of an entrepreneurial science: biotechnology in Britain, 1975–1995’,
Isis, 102, 4, 2011, p. 616.
20 Doogab Yi, ‘Who owns what? Private ownership and the public interest in recombinant DNA technology in
the 1970s’, Isis, 102, 3, 2011, p. 470.
21 Ilana Löwy, ‘Historiography of biomedicine: “bio”, “medicine”, and in between’, Isis, 102, 1, 2011, p. 118.
22 Paul Erickson, ‘Mathematical models, rational choice, and the search for Cold War culture’, Isis, 102, 2,
2010, p. 387.
23 ‘circulation, n.’, in Oxford English dictionary online, Oxford University Press (consulted 23 June 2016).
24 Ulrike Strasser and Heidi Tinsman, ‘“It’s a man’s world?” World history meets the history of masculinity, in
Latin American Studies, for instance’, Journal of World History, 21, 1, 2010, p. 89.
25 Stephen Tuffnell, ‘Engineering inter-imperialism: American miners and the transformation of global mining,
1871–1910’, Journal of Global History, 10, 1, pp. 53, 62.
26 This passage is taken from the abstract pertaining to an article by Michael Tsin on prison and penal practices in
late imperial and early republican China; the passage does not reflect Tsin’s argument but refers to other his-
torians’ views, from which Tsin skilfully dissociates himself. Michael Tsin, ‘Overlapping histories: writing prison
and penal practices in late imperial and early republican China’, Journal of World History, 20, 1, 2009, p. 69.
27 For a discussion of circulation’s association with Eurocentrism in a global history of science, see, for instance,
Marwa Elshakry, ‘When science became Western: historiographical reflections’, Isis, 101, 1, 2010, pp. 98–109.
For a discussion of the same association in the global history of art, and how an approach ‘that emphasizes
circulations of art aims to counter’ diffusionist narratives, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin,
and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, ‘Introduction: reintroducing circulations: historiography and the project of global art
history’, in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, eds., Circulations in the
global history of art, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015, p. 2.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 307 j

pointed out that historians, while seeking emancipation from the weaknesses and teleology of
the concept of modernization, have sometimes replaced terminologies but perpetuated mean-
ing: tradition is now referred to as isolation, modernity as entanglement, and, one is tempted to
add, the peripheral as the local.28 If ‘circulation’ as a terminology is replacing ‘diffusion’, but,
at the same time, perpetuating the old meaning – that is, if by using ‘circulation’ we are merely
paying lip service to a novel agenda but not actually challenging underlying assumptions29
(in this case, the assumption that knowledge, technology or ideas are ‘created locally and
then … transferred outward toward more general contexts’30) – we had much better speak
plainly.

The globe as a closed system


The seeming innocuousness of ‘circulation’ is deceptive in yet another way: namely, in that
open-ended, unidirectional dissemination is but one of the word’s many meanings, and that an
older linguistic background reverberates in global historians’ usage of the word in a manner
that is significant and yet not immediately discernible. To this day, despite the term’s pre-
valence in the humanities, ‘circulation’ is primarily associated with the field of economics on
the one hand, and with biology, anatomy, and physiology, in particular the cardiovascular
system, on the other. A simple search in a general encyclopaedia will make it abundantly clear
that ‘circulation’, in a large part of a modern audience’s imagination, outside a small circle of
scholars in the humanities and social sciences, denotes primarily a biological process, to quote
The new encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘by which nutrients, respiratory gases, and metabolic
products are transported throughout a living organism’,31 and second, an economic process,
by which wealth is being generated through circulation of money and fungible goods.32
Even in the Journal of World History, the Journal of Global History, and Isis, in seven of
the 63 articles, seven of the 81, and one of the 97 that use the word ‘circulation’, or the verb
‘circulate’, respectively, the term is employed in connection with money and currency. Authors
refer to the ‘circulation’ of ‘pesos’, ‘cowrie shells’, Qin coinage, ‘silver’, or other ‘exchange
mediums’.33 According to the Oxford English dictionary, forms of the word ‘circulation’
referring to currency, the context of political economy, and mercantilism, were common in

28 Frederick Cooper, ‘Was nützt der Begriff der Globalisierung? Aus der Perspektive eines Afrika-Historikers’, in
Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, and Ulrike Freitag, eds., Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen,
Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007, p. 131.
29 On how the term ‘circulation’ was introduced in the history of science precisely to displace ‘diffusion’, see
Dommann, ‘Alles fließt’, p. 526.
30 James A. Secord, ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis, 95, 4, 2004, p. 661.
31 ‘circulation’, in The new encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, vol. 3, Chicago: Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1998,
p. 327.
32 See also Dear, ‘Historiography’, p. 203.
33 See, for instance, Alejandra Irigoin, ‘The end of a silver era: the consequences of the breakdown of the Spanish
peso standard in China and the United States, 1780s–1850s’, Journal of World History, 20, 2, 2009, pp. 218,
219, 222, 223; Bin Yang, ‘The rise and fall of cowrie shells: the Asian story’, Journal of World History, 22, 1,
2011, pp. 9–10. See also Elizabeth Ann Pollard, ‘Pliny’s Natural history and the Flavian Templum pacis:
botanical imperialism in first-century C.E. Rome’, Journal of World History, 20, 3, 2009, p. 333, n. 79; Robert
Shaffer, ‘The “internationalization” of U. S. history: a progress report for world historians’, Journal of World
History, 20, 4, 2009, p. 593; Akinobu Kuroda, ‘The Eurasian silver century, 1276–1359: commensurability
and multiplicity’, Journal of Global History, 4, 2, 2009, pp. 245–6; Bas van Leeuwen, Peter Földvári and
Reinhard Pirngruber, ‘Markets in pre-industrial societies: storage in Hellenistic Babylonia in the medieval
English mirror’, Journal of Global History, 6, 2, 2011, p. 190.

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English as early as the 1600s. ‘Circulation’, alongside other corporeal images, became a
metaphor organizing understandings of the economic in 1651, when Thomas Hobbes (1588–
1679) adopted it from William Harvey’s (1578–1657) model of blood circulation, first pub-
lished in 1628 in his Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (An
anatomical disputation of the movement of the heart and blood in animals), and applied it to
the modern tax state in his Leviathan,34 a transfer discussed in Michel Foucault’s 1966 Les
mots et les choses.35 Working mainly from dissections and vivisections, and through insights
from his observations of transport systems, Harvey had concluded that blood in the body was
‘impelled in a circle, and is in a state of ceaseless motion’, that is, that blood moved in a closed
circuit.
Harvey’s meaning was consistent with the oldest usage of the term ‘circulation’, denoting
circular motion or course. The word ‘circulation’ has its roots in the Latin circulatio, derived
from the past participle stem of circulare, ‘to form a circle’, derived in turn from circulus, ‘small
ring’, which originally referred to the ‘orbit’, the ‘circuit of a star’.36 The first source of circular
pictorializaton of recurrent or continuous processes was thus the cyclical aspect of celestial and
astronomical phenomena, even though the circulation concept as an organizing perspective
was soon afterwards extended to meteorological processes, the cycle of life, and, later,
alchemy.37
Historians have long argued that the circulation concept was one of many instances where
medicine and economy helped create the other’s horizon of textual and conceptual possibi-
lity.38 The fact that both fields may more recently have assisted global historians in the con-
struction of their own premises, however, has hitherto gone largely unnoticed.39 Several
prominent scholars in the field have of late used ‘circulation’ to describe circular movement in a
closed system, which encompasses ‘the possibility of the mutations and reconfigurations
coming back to the point of origin’40 or which signifies ‘a double movement of going forth and
coming back, which can be repeated indefinitely’,41 and thus have defined the term in

34 Marcus Sandl and Harald Schmidt, ‘Einleitung’, in Schmidt and Sandl, Gedächtnis und Zirkulation, p. 14. See
also Harry Schmidtgall, ‘Zur Rezeption von Harveys Blutkreislaufmodell in der englischen Wirtschaftstheorie
des 17. Jahrhunderts: ein Beitrag zum Einfluß der Naturwissenschaften auf die Ökonomie’, Sudhoffs Archiv,
57, 4, 1973, pp. 416–30.
35 See Michel Foucault’s discussion of the transfer of the ‘circulation’ concept from medicine to economy. Michel
Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge: eine Archäologie der Humanwissenschaften, trans. Ulrich Köppen,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994, pp. 226–7.
36 ‘circulation, n.’, in Oxford English dictionary online, Oxford University Press (consulted 23 June 2016). See
also ‘circulation, n.’, in Online etymology dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php (consulted 23
June 2016).
37 S. Todd Lowry, ‘The archaeology of the circulation concept in economic theory’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 35, 3, 1974, pp. 435–6.
38 On the relationship between the linked vocabularies of medicine and economy, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick
economies: drama, mercantilism, and disease in Shakespeare’s England, Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p. 3.
39 One laudable exception is Peter Dear, who has pointed to how the concept of ‘circulation’, as it is used by
historians of science today, is ‘partly drawn from the Smithian notion in “classical” economics of the circu-
lation of money and fungible goods’. Dear, ‘Historiography’, p. 203.
40 Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond postcolonialism … and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science’, Isis,
104, 2, 2013, p. 344.
41 See, for instance, the suggestion to employ ‘circulation’ for ‘a double movement of going forth and coming
back, which can be repeated indefinitely’. Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadassm, and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, ‘Introduction: circulation and society under colonial rule’, in Claude Markovits, Jaques
Pouchepadassm, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and circulation: mobile people and itinerant
cultures in South Asia 1750–1950, London: Anthem, 2003, p. 3.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 309 j

accordance with its medical and economic meaning as a closed circular process and in delib-
erate contrast to that of an open ‘dissemination’ without a determined limit or boundary. As
the global historian of science Kapil Raj put it recently in a discussion of the term, the value of
‘circulation’ lay precisely in that it served ‘as a strong counterpoint to the unidirectionality of
“diffusion” or even of “dissemination” or “transmission”, of binaries such as metropolitan
science/colonial science or center/periphery, which all imply a producer and an end user’.42
Indeed, the notion of a closed circular process may well have been more formative and
influential for global history and the history of globalization than practitioners have hitherto
been wont to acknowledge. Economic historians have long argued that the circulation concept
provided the ‘sense of entity necessary for the emergence of systematic economic analysis’.
They contend that modern economic theory had its origin in the application of the paradigm of
a closed circular process to economic life.43 This diagnosis is certainly not straightforwardly
transferable to the field of global history, but the proposition that ‘circulation’ may owe some
part of its appeal, and influence, to the sense of entity it lends to, and presupposes for, the
terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, is well worth seizing. When global historians speak of the
‘circulation of Indian fabrics in the Atlantic world’,44 of the ‘circulation’ of a London-based
magazine ‘throughout Britain and its Empire, Europe, and the United States’,45 of ‘a circula-
tion of young single, male labourers throughout the British world’,46 or of ‘the Atlantic’ as a
‘zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission’,47 they are suggesting not
only a process of dissemination but, essentially in a merger of two of the meanings of ‘circu-
lation’, a notion of passage within a closed entity, both based on and formative of a vision of
‘the British world’, ‘the Atlantic’, or the ‘Western world’ respectively as bounded, coherent
spaces. And not only does ‘circulation’ presuppose and necessitate a sense of entity for parti-
cular areas of the world. One of the reasons for the ubiquitous application of the ‘circulation’
concept in global history may well be the fact that it suggests an idea of the ‘globe’ as a closed
circuit, as an organism with its own regulatory logic, that it is both premised upon and con-
stitutive of the vision of the ‘world as a single system’ which is so tangible in general works on
globalization published in the final decades of the twentieth century.48 Part of the appeal of the
term ‘circulation’, therefore, may stem from its apparent literalness, but it seems that its actual
figurativeness is just as pertinent. The term may be as ever-present and as popular as it is in the
language of global history because its linguistic background reverberates in global historians’
usage of the word, providing ‘the sense of entity necessary for the emergence of systematic’
globalization theory.49 ‘Circulation’ may appeal to global historians because it suggests a
vision of their object of study as a closed system.

42 Raj, ‘Beyond postcolonialism’, p. 344.


43 Lowry, ‘Archaeology of the circulation concept’, p. 429.
44 Chris Evans and Olivia Saunders, ‘A world of copper: globalizing the Industrial Revolution, 1830–70’,
Journal of Global History, 10, 1, 2015, p. 25.
45 Theresa Runstedtler, ‘White Anglo-Saxon hopes and Black Americans’ Atlantic dreams: Jack Johnson and the
British boxing colour bar’, Journal of World History, 21, 4, 2010, p. 673.
46 Bronwen Everill, ‘“Destiny seems to point me to that country”: early nineteenth-century African American
migration, emigration, and expansion’, Journal of Global History, 7, 1, 2012, p. 59.
47 Trevor Burnard, ‘The British Atlantic’, in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic history: a critical
appraisal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 111, cited in Susan D. Amussen and Allyson M. Poska,
‘Restoring Miranda: gender and the limits of European patriarchy in the early modern Atlantic world’,
Journal of Global History, 7, 3, 2012, p. 343.
48 Osterhammel, ‘Globalizations’, p. 93.
49 Lowry, ‘Archaeology of the circulation concept’, p. 429.

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Along the veins of the world


‘Circulation’ may appeal to practitioners of global history because it implies a vision of their
terrain as a closed system, but also, in connection therewith, because it evokes a peculiar form
of transmission or passage within that system, along given infrastructures, a system of ‘veins’
or vessels. Indeed, several of the articles in the Journal of World History and the Journal of
Global History – 13 out of 63 and 81 respectively, that is, 21% and 16% – explicitly employ
‘circulation’ to describe the dissemination of commodities, ideas, or texts within a given
network. Authors refer to ‘Manilamen’ who ‘circulated’ in a ‘global maritime network’50, to
the ‘faster circulation of information’ in the industrial age as it was made possible by ‘new
technologies like the telegraph and photograph’,51 to how the image of the Heroic Guerrilla
‘circulated widely within European radical networks in late 1967’,52 to ‘complex networks of
Chinese pottery circulation in a regional trade network that stretched from East Africa to
the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia’,53 or to how ‘networks are … systems of circulation
through which policy choices flow’.54 Authors in the journal Isis also employ ‘circulation’ to
describe movement along established veins, if somewhat more sparingly, in eight out of 97
articles (8%), speaking of the ‘role of long-distance networks in the circulation of knowl-
edge’,55 of ‘the circulation of products, instruments, practices, and knowledge both in North–
South networks and in the South–South networks that are now expanding’,56 of the circulation
of thought ferried ‘from God through the creation to humanity and thence back to God in an
unceasing circulation of spirit through matter’,57 about how ‘a good rail system … allowed the
easy circulation of people’,58 and of ‘the development of international communication systems
that allowed much more rapid circulation of scientific journals and correspondence’.59
These passages, even though they describe both two- and one-way transmission (spirit is
imagined to return to God, but neither pottery, nor images, nor journals are expected to
return to their producer) – that is, even though not all authors subscribe to the meaning
of circular motion or course – all conjure up a vision of maritime networks, communication
channels, or the rail system as arteries, as ‘organized vessels’ that direct and regulate
movement.
Stuart A. Rockefeller has argued that, ‘while the current popularity of “flow” as a keyword
owes more to the image of cash flow than to that of water flowing’, it still ‘arises from watery
imagery by way of the image of money moving like water’.60 Similarly, when using

50 Filomeno V. Aguilar, ‘Manilamen and seafaring: engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm’,
Journal of Global History, 7, 3, 2012, p. 377.
51 Chinmei Du, ‘Gu Hongming as a cultural amphibian: a Confucian universalist critique of modern Western
civilization’, Journal of World History, 22, 4, 2011, p. 736.
52 Prestholdt, ‘Resurrecting Che’, p. 513.
53 Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, ‘Material culture and the other: European encounters with Chinese
porcelain, ca. 1650–1800’, Journal of World History, 23, 1, 2012, p. 100.
54 Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Bearing tales: networks and narratives in social policy transfer’, Journal of Global
History, 9, 2, 2014, p. 313.
55 James Delbourgo, ‘Listing people’, Isis, 103, 4, 2012, p. 736.
56 Löwy, ‘Historiography of biomedicine’, p. 120.
57 Laura Dassow, ‘Of atoms, oaks, and cannibals: or, more things that talk’, Isis, 101, 3, 2010, p. 595.
58 Lewis Pyenson and Christophe Verbruggen, ‘Ego and the international: the modernist circle of
George Sarton’, Isis, 100, 1, 2009, p. 62.
59 Helen Tilley, ‘Global histories, vernacular science, and African genealogies: or, is the history of science ready
for the world?’, Isis, 101, 1, 2010, pp. 112–13.
60 Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, p. 559.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 311 j

‘circulation’, the word’s historically given association with the movement of blood and other
bodily fluids resonates, even though the association is rarely made explicit – the exception
among the authors under consideration being Jeremy Adelman, according to whom the ‘pro-
duction, circulation, and reception’ of ‘representational artefacts’, their ‘mimetic exchange’,
‘coursed through empires like blood through vessels’.61 ‘Circulation’ conveys a peculiar vision
of how Chinese pottery, heroic images, or ‘Manilamen’ supposedly moved: easily, unhindered,
and smoothly, in a manner that is directed, forward, and aligned, like fluids in vessels. Indeed,
that is another way in which scholars have suggested that we define ‘circulation’: as movement
going on within a ‘network as a structure’,62 as transfer occurring ‘within bounded spaces’ and
systems that have their own (if potentially emerging, changing, and expanding) morphology,63
or, as Arjun Appadurai put it, as ‘flow’ ‘along well-established circulatory paths’, shaped and
governed by ‘circuits or networks’.64 Even for Bruno Latour, whose concept of the ‘circulation’
of ‘immutable mobiles’ has significantly contributed to the term’s popularity, ‘circulation’
happens within, and is inextricably bound up with, the ‘metaphor of an actor-network’, a
hybrid of the mathematical notion of network and the ‘actant’.65
The notion of ‘circulation’ as going on within a ‘network as a structure’, as passage through
‘organized vessels’, poses a series of difficulties for the historian, however.66 For most of us
would not intuitively expect the distribution of journals, the travels of ‘Manilamen’, or the
trade with fragile Chinese pottery across the African continent to be a particularly suave,
unidirectional, or ‘effortless’ affair. Oftentimes, the way in which ‘circulation’ is employed not
only takes our attention away from the real, presumably arduous, uneven, and non-linear,
circumstances of many of these processes, but it also, potentially at least, distorts and biases
our vision of them. ‘Circulation’ may be misleading, as the historian of science Fa-ti Fan
phrased it, because it suggests that ‘people, information, and material objects flowed smoothly
along networks and channels’, obscuring the efforts that went into transportation, the absence
of ‘teleology’ in these trajectories, and the obstructions, standstills, and delays involved.67 This
is not to say that the term is invariably injurious, or that it cannot be valuable or expedient. In
fact, ‘circulation’, explicitly and unambiguously defined as passage along ‘established paths’,
may be a felicitous metaphor when what authors seek to describe are actually passages within a
given structure, built network, or technological system, such as oceanic telegraph cables or a
rail system, and if what they seek to achieve is a greater attention to the ‘infrastructures’ of

61 Jeremy Adelman, ‘Mimesis and rivalry: European empires and global regimes’, Journal of Global History, 10,
1, 2015, p. 79.
62 Claude Markovits, The global world of Indian merchants, 1750–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000, p. 25.
63 Raj, ‘Beyond postcolonialism’, p. 345.
64 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Circulation ≈ forms’, keynote lecture for ‘Loose Canons’ conference, New York Uni-
versity, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, 28 September 2007, http://jwtc.org.za/the_salon/
volume_2/arjun_appadurai_circulation_forms.htm (consulted 23 June 2016).
65 Bruno Latour, ‘On actor–network theory: a few clarifications’, Soziale Welt, 47, 4, 1996, pp. 370–2. On the
role of ‘circulation’ in Bruno Latour’s model, see also Lissa Roberts, ‘Situating science in global history: local
exchanges and networks of circulation’, Itinerario, 33, 1, 2009, p. 17.
66 Bruno Latour reconciles the notion of the closed system and the expansive nature of networks, by arguing
that the ‘network’, even when expanding, ‘has no outside’. Bruno Latour, ‘On actor-network theory’,
pp. 372; 377.
67 Fa-Ti Fan, ‘Circulating material objects: the international controversy over antiquities and fossils in twentieth-
century China’, in Bernard Lightman, Gordon Mcouat, and Larry Stewart, eds., The circulation of knowledge
between Britain, India and China: the early-modern world to the twentieth century, Leiden: BRILL, 2013,
p. 210.

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transmission and passage, the ‘built networks that facilitate exchange’ across distance, and to
movements that follow ‘well-established circulatory paths’.68 It is to say, however, that the
concept is not pertinent if the forms of transmission that authors seek to describe are neither
directed nor aligned, and neither unhindered nor ‘suave’ at all.

The self-evidence of globalization


‘Circulation’ not only makes global processes appear smooth and unimpeded; just as Stuart A.
Rockefeller has argued for the term ‘flow’, it also bestows an ‘abstract and disembodied
quality’ upon the processes it is used to describe.69 In the vast majority of the articles under
consideration, ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, are employed without reference to agency:
in 54 out of 63 articles in the Journal of World History and in 57 out of 81 in the Journal of
Global History (86% and 70% respectively), ‘circulation’ goes without agency, without an
inner motor or force. Again, this tendency is less marked in the journal Isis, where authors
employ the term ‘circulation’, or the verb ‘circulate’, in 48 out of 97 articles that resort to those
terms (49%) without reference to agency. Authors write about the circulation ‘of personnel
and ideas in … a non-governmental organization’,70 about how ‘Marco Polo’s stories circu-
lated in Siena’ after 1300,71 or about how Nepal’s boundaries were ‘an unbounded space
uniquely forged by flows, circulations, and movements involving human communities, ideas,
objects, flora, and fauna’.72 By taking together human actors and inanimate things, as moved
by some unspecified force outside themselves, by everything but their own will, in a kind of
natural, given movement, authors emphasize movement over how this movement was
achieved, who caused or wanted it.73 The tendency to emphasize movement over agency is
most palpable when actors do come into play – when authors refer to how ‘the global circu-
lation of civilizational discourse was appropriated and transformed by local actors’,74 to how
‘brokers’ were ‘spreading the circulating imagery globally’,75 to how ‘officials were able to
control trade … by checking the internal circulation of goods’,76 or to ‘British attempts to
police the borders of colonial India against the circulation of unwanted arms, ideas, and
students’77. ‘Circulation’, so employed, has a life of its own, with actors either going with the
‘flow’ or acting upon it from the outside.

68 In the past decade or so, new intellectual directions in anthropology have begun to make the issue of
infrastructures central. See Brian Larkin, ‘The politics and poetics of infrastructure’, Annual Review of
Anthropology, 42, 2013, p. 328.
69 Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, p. 559.
70 Ian Tyrrell, ‘Reflections on the transnational turn in United States history: theory and practice’, Journal of
Global History, 4, 3, 2009, p. 457.
71 Roxann Prazniak, ‘Siena on the silk roads: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Mongol global century, 1250–1350’,
Journal of World History, 21, 2, 2010, p. 191.
72 Bernardo A. Michael, ‘Writing a world history of the Anglo-Gorkha borderlands in the early nineteenth
century’, Journal of World History, 25, 4, 2014, p. 547.
73 This criticism was expressed by Rockefeller in his reflections on ‘flow’. See Rockefeller, ‘Flow’. Some global
historians have criticized their fellow practitioners for privileging not the manner in which connections come
about but the fact that they do. See, for instance, such a criticism in Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: eine
Einführung, Munich: C. H. Beck, p. 93.
74 Zastoupil, ‘“Notorious and convicted mutilators”’, p. 401.
75 Adelman, ‘Mimesis and rivalry’, p. 85.
76 Roberto Davini, ‘Bengali raw silk, the East India Company and the European global market, 1770–1833’,
Journal of Global History, 4, 1, 2009, p. 64.
77 Joseph Mcquade, ‘The new Asia of Rash Behari Bose: India, Japan, and the limits of the international,
1912–1945’, Journal of World History, 27, 4, p. 641.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 313 j

That same tendency is writ large in the current popularity of the expression ‘in circulation’,
meaning ‘in general use or currency’, ‘available, going around’, and its antonym ‘out of
circulation’, ‘not in general use or currency’, withdrawn and isolated – virtual synonyms for
‘global’ and ‘local’, that which moves and that which does not, that which stays in place.78
Authors in the Journal of World History and the Journal of Global History refer to ‘Chinese
manufactures in circulation throughout Europe’,79 ‘visual images … in widespread circula-
tion’,80 the ‘language of cosmopolitan theory’ as ‘in public circulation’,81 or, conversely, to
how properties were ‘blocked from circulation’.82 Authors in the journal Isis likewise resort to
the expression, discussing how ‘a scheme … was in widespread circulation’,83 how ‘knowledge
of the newly discovered mineral acids came into circulation’,84 or how both the terms ‘“pure
science” and “scientist” were in circulation’ in the late nineteenth century.85 The verb ‘circu-
late’ designates both an act and an instance of circulating – that is, it is both a transitive and an
intransitive verb86 – but in the world and global history journals under consideration, with few
exceptions in the particular sample assessed here, the word is used largely without reference to
human agency.
Again, this usage of ‘circulation’ is not problematic per se, let alone ‘incorrect’ or improper.
It may be entirely appropriate to speak of the ‘circulation’ of goods, people, or ideas
without reference to agency, if what authors wish to highlight is ‘the fact of movement’87 rather
than the causes, contents, or conditions of movement. If that is not their intention, however,
the tendency inherent in ‘circulation’ to downplay, and gloss over, ‘any sort of … agency’
on the side of people,88 as Rockefeller put it for ‘flow’, and any sort of peculiarity, quality, or
resistance on the side of institutions, material culture, or ideas,89 might want to make
the authors handle the term with a certain measure of diligence, and economy.
Particularly at a time when historical scholarship is so preoccupied with uncovering the
‘agency’ not only of all of the world’s human beings, including its ‘subalterns’,90 but also,
across a range of disciplines from design theory to anthropology, of materiality, the

78 ‘circulation, n.’, in Oxford English dictionary online, Oxford University Press, draft additions October 2009
(consulted 23 June 2016).
79 Gerritsen and McDowall, ‘Material culture’, p. 100.
80 Ellen Huang, ‘From the imperial court to the international art market: Jingdezhen porcelain production as
global visual culture’, Journal of World History, 23, 1, 2012, p. 115.
81 Horne, ‘Cosmopolitan life of Alice Erh-Soon Tay’, p. 421.
82 This example is taken from a review published in the Journal of World History: Zouhair Ghazzal, ‘The long
divergence: how Islamic law held back the Middle East, by Timur Kuran’, Journal of World History, 23, 2,
2012, p. 422.
83 Henrika Kuklick, ‘Personal equations: reflections on the history of fieldwork, with special reference to
sociocultural anthropology’, Isis, 102, 1, 2011, p. 26.
84 William R. Newman, ‘What have we learned from the recent historiography of alchemy?’, Isis, 102, 2, 2011,
p. 319.
85 Paul Lucier, ‘The professional and the scientist in nineteenth-century America’, Isis, 100, 4, 2009,
p. 727.
86 ‘Reviewers’ can ‘refuse to circulate’ a narrative by declining to review it. See Jeffrey Gunn, ‘Creating
a paradox: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the slave trade’s violation of the principles of Christianity, reason,
and property ownership’, Journal of World History 21, 4, 2010, p. 629.
87 Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, p. 559.
88 Ibid.
89 As Stuart A. Rockefeller put it, ‘flow’ ‘privileges a form (unbroken, agentless movement) over any content’
(ibid., p. 560).
90 On subaltern agency, see, for instance, Thomas C. Pedroni, ‘Can the subaltern act? African American invol-
vement in educational voucher plans’, in Michael W. Apple and Kristen L. Buras, eds., The subaltern speak:
curriculum, power, and educational struggles, New York: Routledge, 2006.

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physical, sensory, and functional possibilities and ‘capacities’ of materials,91 man-made arte-
facts, or images,92 ‘circulation’ may not in every case be the most appropriate term to talk
about the movement of people, artefacts, and ideas.
What is more, critics of global history and the history of globalization in particular have often
remarked that the field is in danger of being subservient to, providing a genealogy for, validating,
and naturalizing current globalization processes, much like national historians have been sub-
servient to the nation-state, and early historians of empire to imperialism.93 The comparison is
certainly not entirely appropriate, but the euphoria, and the kind of naturalist, ‘organic’ language
used to capture movement and mobility may easily contribute to making globalization seem a
natural and necessary, a self-evident, and, above all, a self-reliant process. At least from the seven-
teenth century, the concept of ‘circulation’ has celebrated movement as both autonomous and vital.
From the verve with which French eighteenth-century hygienists advocated the necessity of the free
‘circulation’ of air in cramped cities to liberal economic discourses about the free ‘circulation’ of
capital, goods, and people, the term has been employed to rejoice over movement and to depict its
‘blockage’ or ‘obstruction’ – any sort of ‘embolism’, as Jürgen Osterhammel put it in a recent critical
discussion of the language of globalization – as, if not unnatural, at the very least detrimental.94
That exultation resonates in the term’s use in the language of global history and the history of
globalization today.95 Indeed, ‘circulation’ is movement, by definition. Whereas the ‘network’, for
instance, is a receptacle for movement and can subsist for any length of time without anything or
anyone moving along its veins, ‘circulation’ is nothing if not (in) motion.96
Perhaps, to overtly and roundly revert to Harvey’s conception of ‘circulation’, the model on
which we are implicitly and partly already relying may provide some assistance. William
Harvey’s model of blood circulation implied an understanding of the circulation system as a
closed circuit, but his concept contained yet another aspect that was not actually implied by the

91 Susanne Küchler, ‘Materials and design’, in Alison Clarke, ed., The anthropology of design, Vienna: Springer,
2010, p. 125; Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: an introduction’, in Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality, Durham, NC,
and London: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 1–50; Susanne Küchler, ‘Materiality and cognition: the
changing face of things’, in Miller, Materiality, pp. 206–30.
92 Bruno Latour, ‘When things strike back: a possible contribution of “science studies” to the social sciences’,
British Journal of Sociology, 51, 1, 2000, pp. 107–23; Matthias Wieser, Das Netzwerk von Bruno Latour: die
Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie zwischen Science & Technology Studies und Poststrukturalistischer Soziologie,
Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Approaches from actor–network theory to the ‘ontological turn’ are increasingly
contributing to a reconceptualization of the relationship between human and non-human entities as not only
symmetric but also symbiotic. For a summary of the debate, see Liana Chua and Mark Elliot, ‘Introduction:
adventures in the art nexus’, in Liana Chua and Mark Elliot, eds., Distributed objects: meaning and mattering
after Alfred Gell, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, p. 10. On the early phase of the ontological turn,
see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, ‘Introduction: thinking through things’, in Amiria
Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds., Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethno-
graphically, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 2.
93 On historiography and empire, see Anne Friedrichs, Das Empire als Aufgabe des Historikers: Historiographie
in imperialen Nationalstaaten, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2011. On historiography and national-
ism, see, for instance, Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, eds., Writing national histories:
western Europe since 1800, New York: Routledge, 1999.
94 Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Globalifizierung: Denkfiguren der neuen Welt’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, 9, 1,
2015, p. 12. For a similar critique, see Dommann, ‘Alles fließt’, p. 531. For an example of one such usage – ‘the
uncertainties and obstructions in the circulation of knowledge’ – see Maxine Berg, ‘Useful knowledge,
“industrial enlightenment”, and the place of India’, Journal of Global History, 8, 1, 2013, p. 119.
95 Sarasin and Kilcher, ‘Editorial’, p. 7. On celebratory rhetoric, mobility, and liquidity, see also Jürgen
Osterhammel, ‘Global history and historical sociology: global history’s need for theory’, in James Belich, John
Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham, eds., The prospect of global history, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016, pp. 38–9.
96 For this argument, see Osterhammel, ‘Globalifizierung’, p. 13.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 315 j

previous meaning of ‘circulation’: the role of the heart as central pulse generator.97 ‘Circulation’
has thus traditionally had an ‘engine’, a ‘heart’, and it may be about time that we recover this
moment of agency buried in the concept and make it explicit in our use of the term. This is not to say
that historians ought to revert to the idea of a system ruled by a hegemonic core; however, authors
might want to pay more attention to, and designate, the ‘social behaviours’,98 ‘practices’,99 or
sensory ‘capacities’ of materials that actuate, accelerate, or, indeed, hold up processes of ‘circulation’.

Metaphors of liquidity
Finally, ‘circulation’ is but one of many metaphors of liquids or images of dynamism and
unconstrained speed – ‘flow’ is perhaps the most conspicuous one – underlying historical,
anthropological, and sociological approaches to globalization today, and, like these other
‘liquid’ metaphors, it rests on a dualism, not only with actors, but also with ‘static places’,
‘settled units’, identity, or property.100 It invokes an image of movement as perpetual and in
continuum, one that has neither an identifiable origin nor an end and one that crystalizes but
momentarily.101 In that vein, authors in the Journal of World History and the Journal of
Global History speak of ‘geographically circulating coalitions of capital’ in contrast to
‘sedentary “gentlemanly capitalists”, based in London’s square mile’,102 or of how ‘the
circulation of power could be altered or disrupted as it moved among different cultural
traditions, bureaucracies, or individuals’103 – a use that relates back to the work of Michel
Foucault, who wrote that power ought to be thought of as ‘something that circulates’, that
passes through individuals instead of being applied to them or held by some exclusively.104
Global history monographs and edited volumes, likewise, stress the term’s usefulness in
breaking with conventional spatial ‘units’ – ‘macro-regions’105 or ‘centres’.106 Historians

97 For reflections on how the role of the heart as central pulse generator opened the metaphor of circulation to
include any entity ruled by authorities, see Roman Marek, ‘Creativity meets circulation: internet videos,
amateurs and the process of evolution’, in Gerhard Fischer and Florian Vassen, eds., Collective creativity:
collaborative work in the sciences, literature and the arts, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011, p. 210.
98 Nicholas Purcell, ‘Unnecessary dependences: illustrating circulation in pre-modern large-scale history’, in
Belich, et al., Prospect of global history, p. 73.
99 Daniel J. Hicks and Thomas A. Stapleford, ‘The virtues of scientific practice: MacIntyre, virtue, ethics, and
the historiography of science’, Isis, 107, 3, 2016, p. 452.
100 Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, p. 559. Jürgen Osterhammel, too, has argued that ‘the idiom of flows and interaction
diverts attention away from settled units such as local communities or nation-states’. See Osterhammel,
‘Globalizations’, p. 94, and ‘Global history and historical sociology’, pp. 38–9.
101 Sarasin and Kilcher, ‘Editorial’, p. 10, write that ‘circulation’ as it is used in the history of knowledge refuses
to comply with the idea that ‘knowledge has a recognizable origin and point of departure’ (‘widersetzt sich
der wissensgeschichtliche Begriff der Zirkulation … der Vorstellung, es gäbe einen identifizierbaren Anfang
und Ausgangspunkt von Wissen’).
102 Sandip Hazareesingh, ‘Interconnected synchronicities: the production of Bombay and Glasgow as modern
global ports c.1850–1880’, Journal of Global History, 4, 1, 2009, p. 11.
103 Stephen Jankiewicz, ‘Orientalists in love: intimacy, empire, and cross-cultural knowledge’, Journal of World
History, 23, 1, 2012, p. 248.
104 According to Foucault, power ought to be ‘analyzed as something that circulates, or rather as something that
functions only when it is part of a chain. It is never localized here or there, it is never in the hands of some, and it
is never appropriated’. Michel Foucault, Society must be defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76,
London: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 29, cited in Joe Painter, ‘Geographies of space and power’, in Kevin R. Cox,
Murray Low, and Jennifer Robinson, eds., The SAGE handbook of political geography, London: SAGE, p. 66.
105 C. Patterson Giersch, ‘Cotton, copper, and caravans: trade and the transformation of southwest China’, in
Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, eds., Circulations: capital, commodities, and networks in Southeast
Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 39.
106 DaCosta Kaufmann, Dossin, and Joyeux-Prunel, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

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reflecting on their use of the term ‘circulation’ have also often reinforced precisely this idea. The
global historian of science Lissa Roberts writes, for instance, that ‘circulation’ ought to
describe ‘a movement without center’, without ‘a clear and privileged point of origin and
return’, a ‘continuous path whose formative trajectory is constituted out of multiple points of
local contact and exchange’.107
An approach that favours the idea of movement without a discernible origin or end is, in
many respects, but the logical consequence of our defection from the dated assumption that
knowledge, technology, or ideas are ‘created locally and then … transferred outward toward
more general contexts’, that is, from passé notions of ‘diffusion’ and, in some measure, of
‘transfer’.108 On the other hand, it may well also be that it is precisely the ‘liquidity’ implied in
‘circulation’ – the fact that it invokes, like ‘flow’, elusiveness, placeless-ness, and intangibility,
the quality of fluids and gases that undergo a ‘continuous and irrecoverable change of position
of one part of the material relative to another’109 – that accounts for the word’s current
popularity. As Stuart A. Rockefeller has pointed out, the key figures in the development of a
language to capture globalization have cherished concepts invoking pure mobility and
de-territorialization, because they ground and justify the ‘now-common approach to globali-
zation’, as the erosion of identity, stasis, and place.110
Rockefeller and others have rightly criticized the excesses of this approach for the field of
anthropology and other disciplines concerned with the present, but the adoption of this ‘liquid’
terminology in the field of history poses a far more fundamental difficulty. Anthropologists and
sociologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, and Manuel Castells developed the
language of ‘liquidity’ explicitly to capture the rather specific experience of societies that enter
the twenty-first century, as fitting metaphors to ‘grasp the nature of the present, in many ways
novel phase in the history of modernity’.111 Liquidity was to them the ‘leading metaphor for
the present stage of the modern era’, our ‘decidedly new’ world of electronic media, fuel-based
mass transport, and a unified global capital market, in which the long effort to accelerate the
speed of movement had ‘reached its “natural limit”’, in its reduction to instantaneity – not for
earlier or, indeed, for ancient, medieval, or early modern societies.112 The very word
‘globalization’ gained currency in the 1970s and 1980s, referring to ‘contemporary, ‘post-
colonial’, or ‘post-Cold War’ globalization, ‘to the present-day state of the world’; it was not
initially coined to imply ‘a narrative in the longue durée’.113 As media anthropologists have
pointed out, even the way in which we use the term ‘circulation’ today is profoundly influenced
by the communicative logic of the new media technology; ‘circulation is a form of the cultural
work of the network society’, in Manuel Castell’s sense of the term.114 Historians, in adopting

107 Roberts, ‘Situating science in global history’, p. 18.


108 Secord, ‘Knowledge in transit’, p. 661. For an application of these conceptual considerations, see Karel
Davids, ‘Dutch and Spanish global networks of knowledge in the early modern period: structures, connec-
tions, changes’, in Lissa Roberts, ed., Centres and cycles of accumulation in and around the Netherlands
during the early modern period, Zürich: LIT, 2011, p. 31.
109 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 1.
110 Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, p. 562.
111 Bauman, Liquid modernity, p. 2.
112 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 4 and 28. For a discussion of the literature in relation to its stance on ‘place-
lessness’, deterritorialization, and ‘liquidity’, see Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, pp. 562–5.
113 Osterhammel, ‘Globalizations’, p. 90.
114 Johanna Sumiala, ‘Circulation’, in David Morgan, ed., Key words in religion, media and culture, New York:
Routledge, pp. 44–5.

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‘CIRCUL ATION’ IN GLOBAL HISTORY 317 j

the essentially anachronistic language of globalization, bought themselves into ‘the social
science mainstream’, a choice that has certainly revitalized and provided legitimacy for world
history in a ‘special and up-to-date variant’, as global history, but this choice may have come at
a cost. Global and world historians are now handling a repertoire of concepts ‘from social
science applied to history’ that may not always be felicitous, and, if the worst comes to the
worst, not even pertinent, commensurate, or ‘timely’.115
This is not to say that global convergence is of recent invention, nor is it to say that we may
not establish connections between past and present forms of worldwide communion. It is to
say, however, that global historians may need to carefully discern where to apply the social
science vocabulary of globalization, and to reflect on whether it is apt for the commercial
networks, republics of letters, or forms of mobility and migration that they are seeking to
represent – whether it adequately reflects the experience and perception of their historical
subjects. Historians need not necessarily abandon their ‘liquid’ terminology altogether; it may
be employed usefully where global historians actually wish to stress ‘liquidity’ – effortless
movement, pure mobility, the erosion of identity and place. In other instances, however, it may
be more appropriate, and more fruitful, for practitioners of global history and the history of
globalization to revert to a language of precision, to name practices: to speak not of migratory
‘flows’ or the ‘circulation’ of people when it is in fact men, women, and children who walked,
drowned, or dragged themselves somewhere else, limited by the speed and range of human or
equine legs; to speak not of the ‘circulation’ of material culture when it is in fact about how
human-made artefacts are being transported on the backs of mules, or hauled, or shattered in
the process; and to speak not of the ‘circulation’ of ideas when they are in fact describing
conversations, letter-writing, or book-reading – for, as Peter Dear put it, the metaphor of
‘circulation’ fails adequately to capture the movement of ideas, ‘because ideas are not like
money, not even like paper money’.116 Global history ‘demands its own intellectual founda-
tions’, and that includes a language, and a terminology, of its own; it cannot be a ‘globalization
approach projected onto the past’.117

Conclusion
‘Circulation’, owing to its variegated semantic history, connotes a range of associative mean-
ings, of which unidirectional dissemination, circular movement, and passage along the vessels
of a closed, if potentially evolving, system are but the most relevant. Indeed, the appeal of
‘circulation’ probably arises, as Stuart A. Rockefeller has argued for ‘flow’, ‘from its sheer
multiplicity’, from how it had ‘a range of meanings in common parlance for centuries, and as a
result … entered the social sciences at many junctures in many contexts’.118 As a matter of fact,
the word’s overwhelming popularity at present may be attributable to a merger of its com-
parative ‘untainted-ness’ with its older, medical and economic, meanings, allowing it to convey
a sense of independent existence for the terrain in which ‘circulation’ occurs, and a sense of
‘smoothness’ and directedness, of self-reliance, as well as ‘liquidity’ and perpetuity, for the
movements it describes. While it is a matter of course for words to be polysemous, for the ideas

115 Osterhammel, ‘Globalizations’, p. 100.


116 Dear, ‘Historiography’, p. 204.
117 Osterhammel, ‘Globalizations’, p.100.
118 Rockefeller, ‘Flow’, p. 557.

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318 S T E F A N I E G Ä N G E R

they elicit to differ according to context, and for word meanings to be fluid and in motion,
variance is unsuitable for a concept that, as the various attempts at defining the term reveal,
pretends to be ‘theoretical’, part of global historians’ jargon and their heuristics. Technical
terminology must respect the ‘boundaries of concepts’ to be useful:119 it ought to contain, by
definition, words that, while they may not be specific to it, adopt narrower senses where those
outside the group would tend to take them in a broader sense. Global history is urgently in need
of a jargon in that sense – of precise, contingent concepts that are sufficiently narrow to make
significant statements about their objects, ‘a differentiated vocabulary that encourages think-
ing about connections and their limits’.120
For ‘circulation’ to be a useful analytic tool, it might be pertinent to limit or confine its
reference: not to use it to describe distribution, diffusion, and spread – we have less equivocal
words to do that – but to designate passages that occur within a closed, if evolving, system, that
are, at least potentially, circular rather than strictly one-way, and to understand and bear in
mind that, in using ‘circulation’, we are highlighting the fact of movement over its contents,
conditions, and contingency. This does not mean that we ought to – or, indeed, possibly could
– ‘standardize’ or regulate the language of the field. Rather it means that we might want to use
the term ‘circulation’ bearing in mind its origins and contours; to engage, deliberately and
rigorously, with the suggestive potential and associations of this and other concepts in our
readers, depending on how they are used in other disciplines or how they were used histori-
cally; and to partake in the intellectual exercise of destabilizing and stabilizing, of critiquing
and reconstructing, terms and concepts, for it is only thus that they will eventually gain clarity,
precision, and contours. At the very least, we, as global historians, ought to be aware of, and
alert to, what we gain and what we lose by resorting to words such as ‘circulation’.

Stefanie Gänger is currently assistant professor (Juniorprofessorin) at the Department for


Iberian and Latin American History, University of Cologne, Germany. Her research is centred
on late colonial and early republican Andean South America but inevitably requires attention
to global intellectual and material connections. She recently published her first book, Relics of
the past: the collecting and study of pre-Columbian antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911
(2014). She has also published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Colonial Latin
American Review, and Modern Intellectual History.

119 Joseph E. Taylor, ‘Boundary terminology’, Environmental History, 13, 3, 2008, p. 455.
120 Cooper, ‘What is the concept of globalization good for?’, p. 213.

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