Abstract
Siep Stuurman is Emeritus Professor of the History of Ideas at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. The central themes in his research and teaching are the history of political thought, state formation, and the history of equality and inequality. In 2017, his book The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History was published by Harvard University Press. Stuurman is currently working on a global intellectual history of socio-economic and political equality and inequality, from antiquity to the present time. In the following, he enlightens us about the different episodes and impulses which led him to an interest in global inequality: from destitute poverty on the streets of New York in the 1980s, to critical discussion of history canons in the Netherlands and his call for a more inclusive cultural and global history, to critiques of slavery and racism in the Enlightenment era.
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- 1.
François Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes, discours physique et moral, où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugés ([1673] Paris: Fayard, 1984), 38 (my translation).
- 2.
Also see Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
- 3.
Siep Stuurman, “The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative,” History and Theory, 39 (2000): 147–166.
- 4.
Maria Grever and Siep Stuurman (eds.), Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-first Century (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- 5.
Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 2017).
- 6.
Louis de Jaucourt, “égalité (droit naturel),” in Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, réd. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (Paris 1751–1772), 5: 415. References are to the online ARTFL Encyclopédie Project: https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/
- 7.
Montesquieu, Pensées / Le Spicilège, ed. Louis Desgraves (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991), 228.
- 8.
Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, 10 vols (Geneva: Jean-Leonard Pellet, 1782), VI: 138–139.
- 9.
Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 10.
Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
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Stuurman, S. (2023). Notes for a New History. In: Christiansen, C.O., Machado-Guichon, M.L., Mercader, S., Hunt, O.B., Jha, P. (eds) Talking About Global Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08042-5_2
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