Introduction: Global Histories of Disability: Thinking about Power, Place and People

This introductory chapter starts by suggesting that the History of Disability needs its ‘global moment’. It surveys some of the contributions Global History has made to historiography more broadly including the move away from the nation-state, embracing of frameworks of mobility and connection to understand the lives of different social groups, and the acknowledgement and exploration of imperialism, colonialism and decolonisation as ideologies and geo-political structures. I then argue that if we bring these insights together, and place the History of Disability and Global History in the same analytic field, we can demonstrate the cultural and chronological specificity of disability and the power of globalisation and imperialism to infect disabled people’s lives across a range of times and places. At the same time, this chapter cautions against taking up Global History uncritically and argues that this, like all other subdisciplines, has its contradictions and fragilities. In addition, this chapter hopes to weave together summaries of the contributions to this book and set them in a wider historical and historiographical context.