"Global History of Europe" uses historiographical methods to analyze Europe’s global entanglement in its local impacts. Exploring Europe’s past and present entanglements by means of historical and interdisciplinary methods of analysis, the historical perspective contributes significantly to the interdisciplinary profile of European Global Studies. In doing so, "Europe" forms not a geographical category but a subject and object of transboundary processes of entanglement.

Pursuing global history beyond eurocentrism, this area of research helps to analyze processes of integration, intersection and adaptation in a transepochal way. The research projects headed by Prof. Dr. Susanna Burghartz and Prof. Dr. Madeleine Herren cross epochal boundaries and offer a global history of Europe since the 16th century. They address the Columbian Exchange as well as the manifold contacts of European actors in Asia and examine their ramifications for Basel and Switzerland. The historicity of the global is analyzed at interdisciplinary junctions. Examining material cultures and border-crossing circulations of objects and practices in transcultural exchange processes, the research considers the scopes of action of mobile societies. True to their interdisciplinary nature, the respective research designs feature intersections with the fields of international and transnational law, art history, economics and anthropology. Their implementation makes for innovative collaborative research projects designed to develop and apply digital methods.