The Century-old International Congress of Historical Sciences (IV)

The end of the Cold War in the 1990s produced an increasingly intimate connection between countries and regions. It desperately needed a closer cooperation with united strength when the world was moving further toward economic globalization, global warming, resource exhaustion and other problems. In this environment, the idea of “human community” has been creeping into the consciousness. The research perspective of history has been extended from nation state to the whole world and thus places more weight on global history, treating it as the main object of study for summarizing the laws of historical development. This represented a major change in research techniques and subjects investigated.

The end of the Cold War was a turning point in the developing course of global history. Termination of the all-out ideological confrontation between east and west created opportunities for the upsurge in global history research, while maturity of the study mechanism provided a theoretical basis.

Since the 1990s, the successive sessions of the ICHS have clearly demonstrated the results of global history research. Attention to global history study has run through the entire process, reflected in the opening ceremony speeches, conference topics, forum discussions and panel discussions. Global history was themed as one of the key issues at the Stockholm Conference in 2000 and was discussed under a range of specific subjects in other meetings. The study of global history then became a common practice.