Aims and scope
How can we define intellectual history? At present scholars who call themselves intellectual historians, or who express an interest in intellectual history, can be found working on a variety of topics, such as the history of identities, time and space, empire and race, sex and gender, natural and popular sciences, the body and its functions, the movements of peoples and the transmission of ideas, the history of publishing and the history of objects, art history and the history of the book, planetary, maritime, and oceanic histories, in addition to the subjects traditionally associated with intellectual history, such as political theory, political economy, and international relations.

Intellectual history defies definition, and intellectual historians are at the forefront of the ongoing global, transnational, comparative, spatial, visual, and international turns in the historical profession. Its fluid identity and prominence have led to rich discussion on the practice of intellectual history in a global age and more particularly to the relationship between intellectual history and global history. David Armitage, for example, has argued that intellectual history is very well placed to deal with the most wide-ranging ideas over long spans of time and across cultures, rejecting the assumption that intellectual historians deal only with specific ideological episodes in narrow and precise contexts. At the same time, and as the edited volume Global Intellectual History (2013) by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori showed, intellectual historians can help in tracking the movement of ideas and their dissemination, and the transformation of ideas across borders and cultures. The Moyn-Sartori collection catalysed debate, with critics such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Ann Thomson, and J. G. A. Pocock, among others, underscoring the limits and possibilities of global approaches to the history of ideas. Reflecting on these historiographical disputes, Or Rosenboim has urged for the transformative potential of the global category, creatively conceived, in the critique it offers against not only the hierarchies of power that shaped – and continue to shape – our world, but the conceptual categories used to analyse it. One such critical heuristic is to rethink the notion of canonicity to engage with those traditionally excluded by such power hierarchies, as demonstrated, for instance, by the collective intervention offered by Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (2022), edited by Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah C. Dunstan.

Intellectual history as a subject has thrived because it gives people the skills to understand an alien persona, the product of cultures and beliefs that are likely to have been altogether at odds with their own. Indeed, to employ the metaphors of John Burrow, the intellectual historian can be described as an eavesdropper on past conversations, as a translator between cultures, and as an explorer of unfamiliar worlds. Intellectual historians can learn to appreciate the different values held by societies whose modes of living may clash with our own and realise that the rationales of such values are explicable. Above all, intellectual history teaches prudence, a sense of the alternative futures articulated by historical actors, the transmission mechanisms they developed to realise those futures, and the limits upon their capacity to improve and sometimes to protect their worlds. Given the lack of disciplinary or geographical boundaries to the subject of intellectual history as traditionally practised, it only makes sense for a journal to exist that encourages exactly these virtues on a global scale.

The late J. G. A. Pocock was not new to thinking about global ideas when he ruminated on the debate generated by the Moyn-Sartori volume and called for a reformation in Cambridge-style intellectual history and for a renewed and inclusive world history of political thought. Across his career he traversed traditional disciplinary boundaries, recovering lost arguments that crossed nations and continents, seeking to explain what they meant to new generations of people who have been schooled in national or narrower forms of history. It is this broader sense of intellectual history that inspires this journal.