ABSTRACT
This concluding piece connects the contributions of the volume to overarching historical developments in the politics of difference in European empires: race-based discriminations and other processes of marginalization, both in- and out-side of Europe, since the Ancien Régime; the ramifications of the slave trade; and the “utopian” elements of settler politics and their racial implications. Finally, it evaluates three current paradigms in the historical research on empires from a methodological perspective: the decolonial movement; the dominant form of global history that responds to an academic model standardized by Euro-American universities and is deployed from a very small number of Northern and Western European languages; finally, an old model that combines epistemological universalism with firsthand and vernacular knowledge of the diversity of human society.
