Pierre Singaravélou

In his book, written with Q. Deluermoz and published by Yale University Press in 2021, Singaravélou examines counterfactual history, futures past, and alternate histories of the future. A Past of Possibilities. A History of What Could Have Been explores the limits and potentials of counterfactual thinking, providing a survey of its uses, methodological issues on the possible in history and social sciences, and practical proposals for using counterfactual history in research and the wider public.

His book Tianjin Cosmopolis (2017) is focused on a short period of time, between 1900 and 1902, when an international government took over the Chinese city of Tianjin. Singaravélou studies also the establishment of nine imperial powers in the city and its agglomeration, in the form of foreign concessions, which quickly became, under the modernising influence of Chinese elites, a unique place for interaction between natives and foreigners. His work shows how part of the Chinese elites were able to meet the challenges of internationalisation at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Singaravélou was one of the coordinators of France in the World. A New Global History published in 2017 under the direction of Patrick Boucheron. The book was released during the French presidential election and became a best-seller in France. The authors were attacked by Eric Zemmour and far-right intellectuals. This work had a great influence in almost all European countries where historians explicitly draw on this French book to propose their own version : Italy (Storia mondiale dell’Italia), Sicily (Storia mondiale della Sicilia), Netherlands (Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland), Flanders (Wereldgeschiedenis van Vlaanderen), Spain (Historia mundial de España), Catalonia (Història mundial de Catalunya) and Germany (Deutschland. Globalgeschichte einer Nation).

From 2009 to 2014, he was senior lecturer at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Sorbonne) in the Department of history, and also taught at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He then became a Fellow at the Institut universitaire de France (IUF, Academic Institute of France) from 2013 to 2018. As of 2015, he is full professor of modern history at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. At the same time, he was appointed director of the Sorbonne University Press from 2015 to 2019. He is currently British Academy Global Professor at King’s College London.

Pierre Singaravélou (born 18 January 1977) is a French Global historian who is a British Academy Global Professor of History at King’s College London. He is also full Professor of Modern History at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and director of the Center for Asian History (Sorbonne). Professor Singaravélou is the former director of the Sorbonne University Press and an honorary fellow of the Institut universitaire de France (IUF, Academic Institute of France).

Singaravélou began his research by proposing a social and political history of French Orientalism in Asia from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s. In his first book on the French School of the Far East, he demonstrated both the continuing archaeological predations in Indochina and the decisive role of Asian intellectuals in the elaboration of knowledge. Then Singaravélou brought together the social and intellectual history of the social sciences with imperial history. In his book Professing Empire, he understood the ways in which French academic culture interacted with colonial expansion, through the institutionalisation of the colonial sciences between 1880 and 1940.