In his 2017 essay “What is global history now?” Jeremy Adelman claimed that “the power of place never went away.”[1] While I do not share Adelman’s cynicism entirely, his polemical essay does raise a pertinent question: is global history in danger of being exclusionary in the name of inclusion? Thematically, my own research has focused primarily on history of foreign aid and, more recently, on history of refugees. Chronologically, I explore these topics in the modern European context, with geographic focus primarily on east-central Europe. In the past few years, historians of this (imperfectly defined) region have started to find their way in relation to global history. These approaches have also become part of my own repertoire. But can a defined space be part of a global history landscape?

Philanthropy, state-building and East-Central Europe

My recent book, titled Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania: In Quest of an Ideal (Stanford University Press, 2024), is a case study analysis that highlights ways international humanitarianism and philanthropy penetrated facets of the state building process in interwar east-central Europe. I argue in this book that Romanian state builders actively pursued, accessed, and often instrumentalized American foreign aid in order to advance domestically-driven projects of nation building. Overall, this study highlights ways recipients of international and humanitarianism and philanthropy shaped (and also could universally shape) trajectories of aid. This study is thematically anchored in various studies on global history and seeks to contribute to broader reflections on what we can call global processes such as humanitarianism and philanthropy. But I remain curious regarding the place of east-central Europe and the ambiguous relationship a defined place can have with global history. And, ultimately, can such a study be included in broader debates within global history?

The issue of philanthropy in the first of the twentieth century is, I believe, a pertinent case: the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), one of the leading organizations at the time became, in many ways, a global actor. Its aid schemes started in the American South, deemed more “backwards” than the North, primarily along racial and industrial lines (e.g. Tennessee, New Orleans); there, campaigns against the hookworm defined much of RF’s domestic philanthropy. During and especially after the First World War, these methods of the American South were transplanted to post-imperial states of east-central Europe such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, or, indeed, Romania. For instance, methods of rural modernization through this US-driven philanthropy trialed in Yugoslavia then were transferred to East Asia and, later on, to Latin America, creating a significant backdrop to contemporary developmentalism. Some historians have reflected already on these trajectories.[2] In my own work I zoom in on the case of Romania as I explore ways this country became a laboratory of rural modernization as an instance of postwar and post-imperial reconstruction. Indeed, Romania was a point within the global map of American philanthropy at the time. Still, I believe more can be done in placing east-central European history in the narratives of global history of development and its genesis, in particular. For example, questions regarding ways local experts shaped the globalization of aid could be a fruitful avenue of dissection.

Global Histories and East-Central Europe

Departing from this, it is worth reflecting: is history of east-central Europe anchored too much in its claimed historical specificities to be included in “global history?” Is it too anchored in European histories and does that make it too Eurocentric for a “global” approach to history? Is this place, with all its localities, borders, and borderlands, antithetical to the global?

Some historians have already attempted to bridge the global and the local of east-central Europe. I suggest that we can certainly identify a turn to global history. For example, historians of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, or Hungary have started thinking about global histories of these spaces. For instance, Theodora Dragostinova and her work on Bulgaria as a case of a “small socialist state in a global cultural scene,” Victor Petrov’s work also on Bulgaria and its place in the history of computing during the Cold War, Friederike Kind-Kovacs and her work on Budapest as a hub of international humanitarianism, or a group of historians in Hungary and a major volume on “global history of Hungary.” However, this has not always been the case in a region deeply suffering (arguably) from nationalist waves of history writing. There are also methodological consideration.[3] In writing my own book, I chose a specifically transnational method, based on Patricia Clavin’s argument that “the histories of transnational encounters in the interwar period(…) tell us much about the national contexts (…) as they do about the world they seek to reshape.”[4] Possible critiques of this approach could suggest an underdeveloped contextualization of the local context and extreme decision-making that might sideline possible nuances regarding Romania’s postwar context. A global history of a place could potentially replicate such criticisms.

Overall, I suggest that the relationship between the east-central European place (in Adelman’s words) and global history is, at this point, ambiguous. This is particularly true in studies that are defined by contexts of border and nation making – i.e. interwar east-central Europe. Still, I believe that conversations across historiographic clusters could address and, why not, overcome the peripheralization of these locales and, thus, avoid exclusionary practices that Jeremy Adelman might have had qualms about.

About the author:

Dr. Anca Cretu is a historian of modern Europe working at the intersection of the history of east-central Europe and international history. She joined the History Department and the GHCC in 2024 as an Assistant professor in Modern European History.

Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania: In Quest of an Ideal

(Stanford University Press, 2024)