Having earlier written a book about Japan’s place in the world deflation and depression of the 1920s and 1930s, he is assembling a global history in which the boundaries and structuring framework are given not by place but by time, and specifically by the conjunctural temporality of international business cycles. One quickly encounters a variety of parallel social processes in numerous, widely scattered places. Analysis of these is usually confined to national histories that are rarely collated and synthesized, while comparable processes are semantically segregated from one another and rendered incommensurable by the use of nationally and regionally distinct rubrics of concept and vocabulary. At what point do we stop speaking of parallel processes and start to speak of common transnational ones? This is one dividing line between comparative history and integrative macrohistory. A rigorous consideration of conjuncture, in the strict classical sense, solves numerous puzzles and opens new vistas of global connectedness that have been missed in the bulk of existing studies.

Biography of Mark Metzler:
BIO: M.A. in Comparative Social History, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1989; BA in International Relations, Stanford University, 1980. Additional coursework at Osaka City University (1995-97), Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama (1989, 1991-92), Beijing Language Institute (1987), and the Freie Universitat Berlin (1977), University of California, Berkeley