The Einstein Circle, entitled "Global History," aimed to explore the possibilities of this still relatively young scholarly approach and to bring together scholars from different fields and disciplines for this purpose. Three concrete questions were at the forefront: First, the pressing question of the reasons for the strengthening of demarcation tendencies and populist currents directed against the promises of globalization. Second, the question of how the hierarchies of knowledge production can be modified and overcome. Still today, knowledge is not equally accessible to all, and large differences in the possibility of knowledge production persist. Moreover, Eurocentric assumptions - a legacy of the long period of Western hegemony in world history - remain formative in many areas. The tools we use to understand the world, both in the public sphere and in the social sciences and humanities, have Eurocentric assumptions built into their very concepts and methods. We were particularly interested in how these dominant ways of knowing have been repeatedly challenged by alternative (nonEuropean) ways of knowing that - at different times and in different parts of the world - have described and conceptualized the world quite differently.
The third focus related to the major issue of global inequality. It was this theme to which we devoted increasing attention as the project progressed. In doing so, we connected to a vibrant international debate that needs to be historicized, geographically expanded, and broadened through a more comprehensive understanding of inequality. Since Thomas Piketty's seminal book Capital in the 21st Century, socioeconomic inequality has become a hotly debated topic in the social sciences and among the general public. In the process, inequality is also believed to be driving political polarization and the rise of right-wing populism in Western countries and beyond. As a result, the debate has generated growing interest among social and political scientists. However, both the historical and global dimensions remain underexposed in our assessment. Here we have sought to make a new contribution. On the one hand, our debates aimed to historicize the debate itself. What was considered unequal in each case was essentially historical - and it varied from place to place. This is too often obscured by a framework derived from the present and the North Atlantic experience. Only a historical perspective helps us understand when and why the Gini coefficient became the measure of choice and other dimensions of inequality took a back seat. From the Confucian emphasis on just government to the gross national happiness calculated in Bhutan today, notions of inequality are specific to time and place. The question of the historical malleability of "inequality" and when inequality was considered unjust must be a central theme of global-historically oriented inequality research.
Moreover, it has become clear that global history, with its anchoring in area studies and its diverse methods, is ideally suited to historicize, de-provincialize, and thematically expand debates in the social sciences. In particular, it is possible to show the connections between intra-societal inequalities on the one hand and historically conditioned processes of global interdependence and (dis)integration on the other. This entanglement is still given far too little attention in the current discussion. Finally, global historians are attuned to the interplay between various factors that produce biases and hierarchies, from geopolitics to class, gender, and race. All of these aspects are part of a research program that we hope will bear fruit in the years to come.