Abstract

This article questions how the adoption of a global scale of analysis has infl uenced, over the last few decades, the historiographical approach to the concept of bourgeoisie, which in the past has long played a role of primary importance both in the master narrative of modernity and in the construction of the Eurocentric point of view. The analysis is carried out on the basis of the essays contained in two collective volumes (Dejung-Motadel-Osterhammel, 2019; López-Weinstein, 2012) explicitly aimed at rethinking the theme of the global bourgeoisie (or middle class) through mostly non-European case studies. In the light of the results of these investigations, the global bourgeoisie seems to be signifi cantly different from the one described by the literature, which in the nineteenth century – and still in the first decades of the twentieth – laid the foundations of the Eurocentric paradigm.