MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

This topic is fascinating in both subject matter and its methodological approach. The opening line impressively frames the fundamental goal of the project by highlighting the simple fact that oceans “resist political boundaries,” while foregrounding how a transnational historical approach can investigate the consequences of this fact. From what I understand, this project will examine how salmon fishing is regulated between profit-driven entities, legal boundaries, and Native Alaskan fishing traditions and seek to identify who has the right to manage salmon in Alaska.

The reckoning between native tradition and practices, and contemporary commercial establishments and practices is, from what I have observed, a topic still underexplored. However, it seems vital for not only understanding the impact of imperialism on Indigenous activity in a postcolonial context, but also for understanding how these complicated relationships continue to occur. By exploring transnational exchanges across the North Pacific and tying it to international relations, labour history, and resource governance, this topic fills a notable gap in scholarship concerning the relationship between commercial and Indigenous rights to fishing.

The range of sources, especially primary sources, is commendable. I also think the examination of other sources concerning Indigenous resource rights elsewhere will, as this proposal mentions, provide a helpful broader analysis by identifying patterns in these practices that are perhaps also transnational in nature. Additionally, I would suggest potentially looking into historiographical shifts concerning Indigenous fishing rights and the relationship between commercial drivers and Indigenous practices. I believe this could provide a wider contextual analysis of the historiographical patterns related to this subject and better emphasize the relevance of the project, especially relating to how it foregrounds Indigenous agency as opposed to just victimization, as well as its emphasis on how ecological commodities shape transnational political and economic systems.

In September of 1939, Hitler violated the German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934 through his invasion of the Polish state and thus began World War II. Hitler’s expansionist ambitions and strong belief in German Nationalism motivated him in his quest to conquer most of Europe in a series of ‘Blitzkriegs’, or lightning war campaigns. In September of 1940, Hitler began his Blitz on the city of London, resulting in the deaths of around 30,000 civilians. However, even through smoke, death, and devastation, the people of London were motivated to keep pushing against the Nazis. This attitude of resilience came to be known as the ‘Blitz spirit’, a phenomenon wherein the civilians of London banded together as volunteer workers, firefighters, and patriots to defend their city. Research surrounding the Blitz often emphasizes this Blitz spirit, yet its vision of a unified London can overlook underprivileged minority communities, specifically Jewish Londoners. This project will ask: to what extent was Jewish resilience during the Blitz distinct from the broader narrative of the ‘Blitz spirit’?

In the 19th century, a large wave of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms transformed the East End of London into a dense community; however, despite this strong presence, Jewish communities were subject to discrimination even before the outbreak of World War II, which continued into the wartime period. Yet, through established synagogues, strong community networks, and shared cultural practices, they supported one another through the continued impairments of London’s antisemitism. This prejudice alongside strong communal structures carried into the Blitz. This project argues that Jewish resilience was shaped not only by wartime conditions, but by pre-existing antisemitism and a strong communal network. When this holds true, it highlights an overlooked narrative of the Blitz experience.

To research this project, I will be utilizing spatial, social, and transnational approaches to challenge the dominant narrative of the Blitz. I will integrate localized focus on the East End and the lived experiences of Jewish communities within it, while also situating these experiences within the broader context of World War II. I will be using a mix of primary and secondary sources to provide a well-rounded context for my project. This includes Jewish-led newspapers based in London, personal testimonies, diaries, and letters, as well as bombing records and additional support from historians such as Angus Calder, Richard Overy, and Juliet Gardiner, to bolster my analysis.  

One of my primary challenges as I begin this project is how specifically to define resilience—would it be visible in the likes of community organization, or something more subtle and everyday? I may treat this as a flexible definition as I go through the project, or perhaps as a broad definition to encompass a wider array of experiences. Another concern is the scale of my project—am I too focused on this specific community, or would it be too broad given its size and diversity? Moving forward, I hope to balance a focus on this community with the broader context of the Blitz in a way that is effective and supports my argument. In doing so, this project aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of resilience, challenging the homogenized narrative of the Blitz and highlighting how it operated unevenly across social and ethnic lines. 

Wimmer and Schiller’s analysis on Methodological Nationalism provided a very interesting read, and I was interested in the role the social sciences played in developing this methodological nationalism, and the effects it had on the way migration was understood and viewed.

The differentiation between the differing periods of migration and the nation state – from 1870 all the way to the Cold War and post Cold War period were very intriguing. The way migration, and the existence of migrants in these developing ‘nation states,’ changed throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century was surprising. E.G Ravenstein’s analysis on migration in the late 19^th century showed that at this point many didn’t differentiate between internal and international migration. Due to there being less emphasis on the power of the nation state at this point, the movement of people into new territories was not defined by borders, but simply by movements to new areas. I feel this holds relevance to the modern day, where any form of migration is simply defined by the borderland, and less by culture. There is so much emphasis on people moving beyond ‘nation states’ – a philosophy that we ourselves created. Whilst an individual moving from London, to Shetland, would not be seen as a migrant, they would be moving into a totally different culture, yet wouldn’t be viewed as a migrant.

Moreover, it was eye opening how quickly the world forgot about the free labour systems pre–World War 1, and that the further development and entrenchment of nation states globally meant the world of free movement was quickly forgotten. Immigrants went from being valuable to cyclical employment, to perceived as a threat, in a world where suddenly everybody had to belong to ‘somewhere.’ The very cultures that had been developed by the transnationality of the past, were now threatened by it.

To me, one of the most fascinating and engaging aspects of studying history is its cooperation with a multitude of different disciplines. Anthropological, sociological, political, economic, linguistic and other writings are thus right up my alley. It is also what interested me about this history course: it is based in the study of a methodology rather than content like a specific region or time period or theme. As recommended for this week, I started off with Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller’s essay, ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration’ (2003). Written by an anthropologist and sociologist, some of the jargon was unfamiliar. I regularly find myself having to look up definitions and concepts while reading articles, but I can sometimes feel a bit over my head when even the search engine summaries cannot guide me. Yet, despite its considerably theoretical discussion of the origin and modus of the social sciences and migration studies over the past two hundred years, this article was honestly a pleasure to read. It is magnificently signposted, allowing me to seamlessly organize my notes to mirror the structure of the essay’s argument while reading. 

In ‘Methodological Nationalism’, Wimmer and Schiller confront the social sciences’ conceptual tendency to naturalize the unit of the nation-state in an epistemic structure in which variants of methodological nationalism intersect and reinforce each other, perpetuating a static analytical approach in postwar migration studies. They outline isomorphisms between the citizenry, the sovereign, the solidary group, and the nation in nation-states and examine how migrants’ disruption of these isomorphisms led to their control, supervision, limitation, and exclusion by nation-states. Postwar theories of immigration presupposed a dynamic in which a nation-state society and its incoming immigrants were diametrically opposed: one on the inside, and one on the outside. Not only has this epistemic approach alienated migrants, invalidated migrant experiences, and even villainized entire immigrant communities, it also largely ignores migrations within nation-states. This creates a problematic double standard for who is allowed to claim national affiliation and for who is classified as a migrant and subsequently treated as a foe. The institutionalization of immigration control in the interwar period generated an erasure of historical memories of the transnational and global processes by which nation-states formed and the role of migration in those processes. By the Cold War era, patriotism had become a social necessity for human belonging. However, parallel to this was the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the US, which validated diasporic identities and cultural pluralism. 

The emergence of the transnational paradigm made serious headway for the historical acknowledgement of diasporic identities and long-distance nationalism, but residue of methodological nationalism still persists. As an avid linguistic learner, I especially appreciated the example of the semantic breakdown of ‘transnational’: ‘national’ counterproductively reproduces a view of the world as divided into nations by referring to the ‘nation’ as the entity that is crossed or superseded. Equally important, just as ‘internal’ migration was overlooked, migrant communities united by forms of identification other than national constructions – e.g. religion, cultural connections, languages – are only now beginning to be examined with migration studies. Through a classic mythological reference to Charybdis and Scylla, Wimmer and Schiller advise transnational historians, scholars of migrant studies, and social scientists alike to distance themselves from the bounds of nationalist thought, but to not stray into to the realm of extreme fluidism. “While it is important to push aside blinders of methodological nationalism, it is just as important to remember the continued potency of nationalism”. 

This discussion of migration, sovereignty, and belonging resonated with my project on maritime resource allocation, Native sovereignty, and international commerce in Alaska in many ways. Returning to Wimmer and Schiller’s point on the dynamic betweem a nation-state society and its incoming immigrants being diametrically opposed, Alaska employs a diametrically opposed dynamic between a nation-state society and its Native population.  It is a place in which those with the most essential sense of belonging to the land, Alaska Natives, have had to fight the hardest for patriotic recognition. Meanwhile, from the Russian-American company to the United States, immigrants to Alaska have held militaristic, legislative, and economic power over Native populations. In their discussion of nation-states and patriotic belonging, Wimmer and Schiller have made the methodological choice to examine only two players. I wonder how their analysis might have tackled the introduction of a third player, Indigenous groups. 

This week’s readings on migration highlight how the field has been reshaped by broader historiographical shifts towards transnational and global history. Circling back to our first weeks and Clavin’s argument, she says that transnational history is less a fixed methodology than an approach that foregrounds connections and transfers across boundaries and opens up new ways of thinking about historical processes. Migration history, perhaps more than any other field, demonstrates the value of this perspective, as it inherently challenges the assumption that societies can be understood within the confines of nation-states. Similarly, Suanier emphasises that histroians must move beyond methodological nationalism by focusing on relations between, across and through societies. Migration provides a clear example of why this shift is necessary. Traditional approaches often treated migration as a linear movement from one national context to another, focusing on immigration policies or patterns of settlement within a single country. However, the readings for this week instead conceptualise migration as a multidirectional and ongoing process embedded in glocal systems of labour and state formation.

Wimme and Glick Schiller’s critique of methodological nationalism is particularly useful in this regard. They argue that migration studies have too often reproduced national frameworks by taking the nation-state as a given unit of analysis. Contrastingly, they propose a transnational approach that examines the networks, practices, identities, and movement that extend across borders. Their perspective is reflected in Reinecke’s analysis of migration in modern Europe, which situates mobility within broader processes of state-building and global economic change. Migration is thus shaped by transnational labour markets and political structures that link different regions.

Van de Laar’s focus on cities further reinforces the shift away from the nation as the primary unit of analysis. By examining urban spaces as places of global migration, he highlights how local experiences are embedded in wider transnational networks. Similarly, Casmiscioli’s work demonstrates how migration was central to the construction of national identities, particularly through discourses of race and gender. These readings show that migration actively reshapes national boundaries.

The AHR ‘conversation on Transnational History’ reinforces this point by noting that transnational approaches encourage historians to examine both the origins and destinations of migration, as well as the movements in between. This more relational perspective allows for a deeper understanding of how migration connects different societies and challenges fixed notions of belonging.

This week’s readings demonstrate that migration history is a key site for the development of transnational approaches. By foreground movement and exchange, migration studies reveal the limitations of nation-centred frameworks and offer a more dynamic understanding of historical change. In this sense, migration history exemplifies the broader historiographical shift identified by Clavin and Saunier, showing how historians can move beyond the nation-state to better capture the complexities of the modern world.

Wimmer and Schiller’s article acts as a critique of how social sciences have traditionally framed, and progressively begun to frame, migration. Their central claim is that much of twentieth century historiography operated under a belief in ‘methodological nationalism’, treating the nation-state as the natural, and in some cases sole, unit of analysis, and to equate society itself with the nation-state. This then assumes that political and social life can be easily and neatly contained within national borders, which fails to treat nationalism as its own living historical force, naturalises the nation-state by treating it as a purely self-evident object of study, and territorially limits analysis by confining it to state borders. For Wimmer and Schiller, this flawed framework has had a great impact on disciplines from sociology to economics, and has produced a ‘container model’ of society where culture, solidarity, and polity are all neatly aligned within a national space when the actual reality of the situation is never that simple. In such a model, migrants become simple, inhuman, ‘anomalies’, they disrupt this supposed neat order and as such are treated as a problem that must be solved. This ‘problem solving’ can be seen in how postwar migration studies often focused on assimilation, integration, loyalty, perceived welfare dependence, etc. rather than taking a step back and rethinking the frame being used. They also argue that the nation-states themselves were not particularly self-contained, that instead modern states emerged through transborder processes, such as imperialism and colonialism, that are often obscured, deliberately or overwise, by a purely national approach to history.

However, they also warn that a rejection of methodological nationalism must also refrain from endless mobility or borderlessness for their own sake. In this, Wimmer and Schiller tackle something that has become very common in many works on the subject of refugees in the modern world. While socially progressive circles have begun to shift away from the narrative of victimising and removing agency from refugees, and reassert that they are neither burdens on the nation-state that accepts them nor something that should be pressured to ‘assimilate’ into this new nation-state, these currents often fall into the very generalisations and denial of agency common amongst socially regressive circles. Their ‘methodological fluidism’ often placing too much weight on one singular material fact, the fact that they are refugees, and losing sight of the many more surrounding pressures. Where an ethnonationalist would label these refugees as agents of destabilisation for the country, and a social progressive of the type covered previously would blanket them as agents of liberation, Wimmer and Schiller instead argue that their politics are not determined solely by their status as refugees. They argue Instead that the simple act of being a refugee tells us very little about the actual beliefs and social framework of a refugee, for such things are the product of conditions that run far deeper and older than any modern day conflict or humanitarian crisis. Refugees are diverse, even refugees that come from the same country, ascribing to different religions, coming from different cultures, ethnicities, and believing in different political ideologies.

In summary, Wimmer and Schiller have provided a much-needed criticism of a purely cosmopolitan interpretation of refugees that itself emerged to combat the nationalist framing of refugees. Where methodological nationalism has long been the target of post-modern criticism and attempts to excise its influence from historiography the reactionary cosmopolitanism it triggered has been analysed to a far lesser degree. Works such as these are, in my opinion, of great importance in exposing the similarity between a purely cosmopolitan and purely nationalist approach to migration, where one labels refugees as inherently transgressive in a negative manner, the other uses it in a positive one.

Crisis often always reveal how nations define belonging and this week’s readings show that policy surrounding immigration in the early 20th century was not just about control but also who counted as part of the nation.

Reinecke argues that WWI did not suddenly produce immigration systems that were restricted but rather accelerated already existing trends. Britain had already begun to limit their immigration with the 1905 Aliens Act, and expand their state’s power and control dramatically. The government was able to find new ways to monitor and control “aliens” both at the border and within the country itself through the use of registrations, identifying documents, and increased surveillance. By the 1920s, even liberal states like Britain had built a strong bureaucratic system of immigration control that was strict and heavily enforced. 

Elisa Camiscioli wrote on France and highlighted a different but related shift. After the demographic crisis that arose after World War I, French policymakers decided that immigrants were not just workers but had the potential to be reproducers of the nation. Beliefs surrounding immigrants began to be tied to race, gender, and national survival, with certain groups seen as “assimilable” and others excluded. Immigration policy, in this sense, became about shaping a future population, not just managing labour. 

Both of these readings show that crisis intensified concerns about identity which led the states to more actively define and regulate belonging within their respective nations. This is relevant for my research project on Jewish resilience during the Blitz. While the Blitz is oftentimes remembered as a unified experience (sometimes referred to as “Blitz spirit”), this narrative can overlook minority experiences. Jewish communities had long been established in Britain and many had been shaped by earlier migration and restrictive policies. Despite them still being part of the national resilience, they also existed within systems that continued to categorize and monitor them. 

Reinecke’s focus on bureaucratic control is especially useful here. Systems that were developed during World War I did not simply disappear but shaped how populations and people were understood during World War II. This raises questions surrounding the experience of Jewish Londoners: Where they apart of the unified national community, or within a framework that still marked them as different, or both?

Ultimately, these readings suggest that belonging is never a fixed idea within a nation. In times of national crisis, it is often reconstructed and often unevenly experienced. 

Camiscioli’s article on the French pro-natalist movement was incredibly interesting, as it showcases how the nation-state, as an organizational unit, is more fluid and unstable than our social sciences often describe. As Wimmer and Schiller discussed, narratives of the nation-state are ignored or perceived as natural, and formalize a perception of the groups within the territory as constant and unchanging. Camiscioli shows how citizenship and belonging change as interests shift. France reimagined belonging from the previous era’s Enlightenment universalism (dictating that every individual could assimilate into the nation) to focus on reproduction, the maintenance of white hegemony and colonial power, and a shift to civic duties. Various elements prompted this change: a frustration with modernity, colonial concerns, the rising influence of various Asian countries, and challenges to gender roles and dynamics. Additionally, scholarship and the sciences, such as ideologies of racial hygiene and civilization (both in Malthusian and linear progression of modernity), informed these understandings of belonging.

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I am not fully on board with the idea that Enlightenment Universalism fully informed the nation-states’ understanding of belonging. Certainly, the language from the Enlightenment helped articulate the liberal and democratic ideals of the era; however, these foundations were still racialized, despite the fluid mobility across borders. Although, admittedly, my understanding of this topic is informed by American migration history. I find Camiscioli’s article to be somewhat congruent with Barbara Welke’s book, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States. Welke discusses how the concept of the borders of belonging is a conceptual tool suited to describe the consequences that states attach to identities such as gender, race, and ability. She argues that belonging for some groups is often achieved through the subordination of others and entails this constant negotiation of what it means to belong in a nation-state. This idea applies to Camiscioi’s work, as the criteria for belonging changed in France. The “organic” cultural groups of the nation-state expanded to allow  Spanish, Italian, and Polish immigrants to integrate into French society and defined who couldn’t belong. This process might have expanded the borders of belonging for French society, yet drew harsh boundaries— turning Asian and African colonial subjects completely unassimilable and incompatible with “white culture”.

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While reading this article, I also noticed some similarities with my project on the Far Right. Although this reading is before the periods I am studying, it articulates earlier ideas and debates that shaped the development of the New Right thirty years later. Most significantly, this article echoes the New Right’s tension with the aftereffects of modernization and its role in the civilizational narrative. Modernization was considered crucial for maintaining white hegemony and economic dominance. However, conservatives also longed for this (somewhat mythical) shared cultural past that deteriorated due to the changes spurred by globalization and modernization (this is evidenced in concepts of biological determinism, ideas of “natural and innate’ gender differences, fertility, and rural life). It showcases this ongoing debate to define their relationship with a changing world– and leads to ignoring nationalism when imagining the past– and drawing from a history that wasn’t perfectly aligned with the ideal of the nation state of their time. However, despite this desire to return to this idealized harmony of the history, where the “organic” culture was aligned with the mores and norms in society, the goals of this pro-natalist movement are still deeply aligned with modernization and the nation state, as concerns over Frances’ dwindling population are shaped by fears over their decline of colonial power, lack of industrial workers, and dwindling miliary force.

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This project investigates how Ulster unionists cultivated international support and connection during the Troubles. Transnational history has only recently gained traction in the historiography of modern Ireland. Much theoretical groundwork for the application of transnationalism was laid only in the 2010s by scholars like Enda Delaney and Niall Whelehan, who criticised the field’s methodological solipsism while highlighting the transnational dynamics underlying such themes as nationalism and migration. This inspires the project to place the Troubles under a transnational perspective. For all the communal strife and sectarian violence, Northern Ireland during this period remained closely connected to the wider world through media coverage, flows of arms and funds, and an internationally-mediated peace process. A transnational scrutiny of the Troubles, therefore, has the potential to shed new light on our understanding of a transnational modern Ireland.

The focus on Ulster unionism addresses another historiographical gap. Associated with colonialism and sectarianism, unionism has long been monolithically portrayed as always parochial and rejectionist. Regarding external connections, it is frequently assumed to have been unwilling — and unable — to defend itself and seek support beyond Ulster. This perception contrasts sharply with the ready incorporation of Irish nationalism and republicanism into transnational histories, exemplified by a recent volume on the global resonance of the Easter Uprising. By comparison, Ulster unionism remains one of the most cut-off subjects within an already insular historiography. Few studies address transnational Ulster unionism during the Troubles. Notable exceptions, such as Andrew Wilson’s works on unionism in the United States, offered only broad surveys rather than an in-depth dissection of how unionists cultivated international support, namely the tactics of persuasion they might have employed in different cultural and political contexts. As a result, the transnational dimensions of Ulster unionism during the Troubles remain underexplored, reinforcing the enduring image of unionism as inward-looking and disconnected from wider transnational networks.

By analysing the rhetoric and tactics Ulster unionists used to cultivate a more benign international image, this research seeks to offer a more nuanced reading of unionism beyond the one-dimensional, and arguably over-simplistic image of parochial rejectionism, while situating modern Ireland more firmly in a transnational context. The study focuses primarily on the actions and rhetoric of unionist politicians, examining how they fashioned and legitimated their cause to external world through speeches, broadcast appearances, and foreign tours. Here, official records from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the National Archives of Ireland provide key sources for this analysis. Meanwhile, the research considers developments at the grassroots level — namely the popular outreach of unionism and public reception thereof — by drawing on newspaper archives as well as historic pamphlets. One that might be particularly interesting to look at is Ulster: The Facts, a pamphlet circulated by unionists during their 1982 North America tour. Visual culture offers another possible perspective. Murals in Northern Ireland are public display of communal identity and political claims, which might function as an additional channel of unionist self-articulation to the outer world. Overall, a rich possibility of sources exists for this very much under-explored field. Preliminary research suggests that unionists were able to deploy quite adaptive rhetoric, drawing on Ulster-American connections as well as charges of communism and terrorism to appeal to foreign audiences in the postwar context. Therefore, this project hopes to show that unionists were more engaged with international opinion than their reputation suggests. In so doing, it aims both to challenge the enduring image of unionism as invariably insular and to foster a more transnational understanding of modern Irish history.

Wimmer and Schiller’s article offers very comprehensive information on approaching migrants historically. Indeed, migration can be seen as a disruptive force to the common assumption of the “isomorphisms between citizenry, sovereign, solidary group and nation”, not least when the migrants’ assimilation into their adopted nation and political allegiance might be in question. This crucially points to the insufficiency of taking political boundaries for granted as units of historical analysis, as the border are in many ways porous — in the case of migrants, it is penetrated by the migrants continued financial, familial and political attachment to the motherland. This is also reflected in my current research on the transnational dynamics underlying the Troubles where Irish communities overseas (Irish-American Catholics especially) remained very much concerned with sectarianism and violence in their distant homelands, and played crucial roles as both the influenced and influencers over the course of the conflict. Place of births or citizenships (could be summed up as political geography) were therefore far from absolute determinant factors of spheres or extent of influence and interaction which were swayed by a vast array of other matters ranging from ancestry and religion, to ideology and wealth. The research by van de Laar on port cities acts as an excellent empirical study that illustrates the merits of this standpoint. By placing Liverpool, Bremen, Rotterdam and Marseilles alongside each other, the essay exemplifies the notion of translocality — these port cities probably had more connection, or were more comparable with port cities elsewhere than inland cities in their immediacy. Importantly, port cities act as windows on a wider world, with the waterfront areas being zones of contact. 

I find van de Vaar’s writing on the waterfront highly intriguing, as it introduces a spatial nuance which distinguishes between areas of port cities where particular transnational connections are felt to varying extents. Waterfronts in particular were perceived as more of a frontier than border, being an area of intense economic exchange as well as place of departure/arrival for migrants. At times it even acquired the reputation of being promiscuous enclaves, as “pools of corruption, with poverty, crime and alcoholism”. To me this makes for a rife field to combine transnational history and spatial history. Namely, would these specific contact zones “feel different” as one sees of steps into them — would there be certain visual marker, regulations or norms, or even other unique senses (noise of port labour, smell of the ocean/certain cargos, etc.) that mark out the waterfront to their contemporaries. Being from Shanghai, a city known for western concessions and territoriality in the modern era, I had particular echoes with such particularity of waterfront areas. Even until this day, whenever I wander onto the Bund (the heart of foreign concessions sitting right by River Huangpu), the sound of the cargo ships’ horns, the distinctively western style of buildings and the noise from sky bar parties on top of them (hosting primarily foreign customers) constantly remind me that this has once been, an arguably still is a contact zone where the east meets the west. Indeed for many Shanghainese, the Bund remains a place apart for both its familiarity and alienness to them — being only less than 10 kilometres from my home near Xujiahui, part of me somehow feels closer to Covent Garden than Xujiahui.  One can extend this spatial scope, in fact, onto the broader study of migration, especially their physical presence in their destination. Would flags, attires, appearance or even accents mark their communities out as particular in the eyes of both locals and themselves? And how would this impact on their assimilation to their adopted societies and their sense of connection/separation from their distant homes? With transnational histories being particularly fond of playing the game scales, it would be potentially fruitful to combine the vast scope of detecting transnational ties with a microscopic perspective on how such dynamics were manifested on the ground through spatial media. 

The displacement of the White Russians following the Russian Civil War produced one of the largest and earliest politically defined refugee diasporas of the interwar period. This exodus provides a vantage point on the legal status and political identity of post-1920 migratory groups, and since statelessness exists as a condition between jurisdictions, rather than belonging to any single one, a transnational analysis is not merely useful but methodologically necessary. This project will examine how White Russian émigrés navigated and influenced the emerging interwar practices, both international and local, that were used to govern and deal with so-called ‘stateless’ people through a comparison of the contrasting governance environment of Paris and Shanghai.

For this project, ‘White Russians’ refers to subjects of the former Russian Empire who, during and immediately after the Civil War, were a part of the White movement or were civilians who fled due to anti-communist political beliefs. ‘Statelessness’ refers to a person who lacks any form of recognised nationality and is thus incapable of being issued or possessing a legally accepted national passport. ‘Shaping governance’ will be interpreted to mean measurable two-way interactions between these stateless persons and their residential authorities or institutions, primarily through traceable means, such as petitions, mutual-aid infrastructures, and policing/surveillance.

My working hypothesis is that statelessness, rather than simply being a condition imposed from above, functioned as a driver of institution-building from below: White Russian communities constructed work, welfare, and documentation, while their host authorities responded through a formalisation of categories and controls relating to the recognition of nationhood. The League of Nations’ Nansen passport provides the transnational entry point, as an internationally derived mechanism explicitly designed to be used across jurisdictions, it allows us to ask how a single supranational instrument was locally adapted and contested across greatly different sites.

To keep the project manageable, I will focus on 1920s-30s White Russian communities in Paris, a relatively consolidated national administrative setting, and Shanghai, a multi-jurisdictional imperial treaty-port. This project will aim to discover whether similar mechanisms of community authority and documentary governance emerged under structurally dissimilar conditions, and what those similarities or divergences reveal about how statelessness as a transnational legal category was negotiated on the ground.

The project draws on three bodies of sources. First, international and humanitarian records on refugee categorization and mobility (including debates and practices surrounding documentation). Second, émigré-produced sources such as newspapers, organisational bulletins, and memoirs, to reconstruct how émigrés presented their own status, legitimacy, and collective purpose. Third, host-state and municipal materials, such as legal and policing/surveillance records, to gauge tensions between refugee self-organization and external governance. Hoover’s Russia Abroad Digital Collection, an open-access archive that has digitised more than one million pages from nearly six hundred Russian émigré newspapers, provides an in-depth comparison of discourse across sites and years. The supranational perspective will be granted through the use of Claudena Skran’s work Refugees in Inter-War Europe. Municipal sources will rely on archival resources for the cities of Paris and Shanghai themselves, such as the Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères for Paris, and the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) files dedicated to the status of White Russians in Shanghai from 1920-44.

This project contributes to the historiography of transnational history by connecting diaspora social life and political organisation to the development of refugee governance, rather than treating ‘refugees’ as passive objects of policy. It also challenges blanket narratives of ‘the White Russian diaspora’ by asking whether similar mechanisms of community authority and governance emerged in a European capital and an East Asian treaty-port. Likely counterarguments are that émigré influence on governance is overstated and that émigré sources exaggerate their own political unity. I will address these by comparing personal émigré narratives against administrative records, and by foregrounding the internal fragmentation along class, regional, and political lines that existed within the White Russian diaspora.

The main challenges to this project are the linguistic diversity of the sources, uneven or incomplete archives, and the potential for the geographic scope of the covered communities to expand. The project must therefore keep a tight focus to Paris/Shanghai and use term-consistency checked machine translation to allow for close reading of original-language passages rather than relying on secondary sources.

This project will explore the relationship between race and golf from a transnational perspective, focusing on both change and the persistence of exclusion within the sport. It asks how far the racial dynamics of golf have changed from the twentieth century to the present, and whether that change has extended beyond image, to the deeper structures of racial and class inequality that have shaped access to the game. Furthermore, the case study of Tiger Woods as a breakthrough Black golfer will help evaluate whether golf has escaped its exclusionary past.

Golf has historically been associated with whiteness, elite privilege, and exclusion. Spreading from Scotland through imperial links and upper-class networks, the sport developed within private clubs that often restricted access based on race and class. This tradition extended to the professional ranks, where the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) limited members to golfers of the Caucasian race until 1961.[1] This history makes golf a revealing case to examine how racial barriers within the sport have been questioned, challenged and sustained.

Thus, the rise of Tiger Woods in this environment provides a valuable case study. His record-breaking 1997 Masters victory challenged the long-standing notion of golf as a white sport, creating visibility of a non-white golfer dominating a historically exclusive game. However, this project will not simply follow Woods’ achievements but instead use his career to investigate how race in golf was reimagined across different national and cultural contexts. Lane Demas stresses the importance of his breakthrough as a Black athlete in a sport historically linked with colonialism, wealth and whiteness.[2]  Andrew Billings extends this debate further, highlighting the importance of Woods’ self-identification as ‘Cablinasian,’ due to his mixed heritage.[3] His mother’s Thai background saw him celebrated as partly Asian, and thus Woods didn’t represent a single racial narrative, but became a transnational figure through which race in golf was renegotiated.

Junior golf is important to this project, as it shows whether racial change in golf moved beyond image, to a structural level. Matthew Hawzen et al.’s[4] analysis highlights that junior golf continues to reproduce social inequality within golf, which helps explore the limitations of recent racial changes and Woods’ impact. Moreover, while focused on golf, this project will also situate the sport within the wider context of race and sport.

To avoid this project simply becoming a biography of Woods and his achievements, Jill Lepore’s ‘Historians Who Love Too Much’ provides a framework for preventing the project from becoming biographical. She warns against coming too close to a subject, which is an issue I could face as a golfer. Thus, rather than treating Woods in isolation, the project will use his career to uncover broader issues of race, class and exclusion within golf.[5]

The project will draw on a range of primary sources, including PGA records such as the ‘Caucasian clause,’ and newspaper articles from the 1990s and 2000s showing how Woods’ success was framed in different national contexts. Statistics will also play a key role in determining how diversity in golf has changed in recent decades, particularly in key areas of investigation like junior golf.

Together, these primary sources and the secondary literature on race and sport will help investigate how golf has moved away from its exclusionary past and where its deeper structural inequalities remain intact. Because golf continues to struggle with questions of race and class, this project holds value beyond its immediate case study, offering clear scope for further research into the persistence of inequality within the sport.

Maritime environments are particularly suited to transnational history because oceans resist political boundaries. Alaska’s fisheries, situated at the crest of the North Pacific, have long existed within international economic, ecological, and political systems. Within this maritime context, Alaskan salmon fisheries involve communities with subsistence traditions, state and federal regulators, commercial interests, and international governing bodies. Land and resource rights are a crucial aspect of Native sovereignty, but commercial salmon management areas, as defined by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG), differ from the Native Alaskan regions defined by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). How, then, are subsistence, sport, and commercial fishing rights defined between rural communities, ANCSA regions, and salmon management areas, and who decides? In essence, this project asks, who has the right to manage salmon as a natural resource in Alaska?  

Methodologically, this project will adopt a transnational approach. Rather than treating Alaska as a contained space, this approach will examine how salmon operates across borders: salmon migration routes connect Canada through Alaska into the wider North Pacific, commercial fishing fleets and processors have historically employed foreign workers, and resource governance involves multiple states, countries, and communities. Transnational history also emphasizes the movement of ideas and institutions. In this regard, fisheries governance in Alaska is shaped by international agreements, shared ecological management strategies, and global debates about Indigenous rights.   

This project will draw on sources that highlight this overlapping and integrated network of resource governance. First, legislative documents like the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), and Limited Entry System (established 1973) bear relevance as both reshaped Indigenous land claims and subsistence rights in Alaska. Next, this project requires listening to and reading firsthand accounts of Native Alaskan experiences in the shifting landscape of fishing in their communities. Furthermore, records of fisheries management organizations such as the Pacific Salmon Commission and North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission illustrate how salmon migration requires international coordination across the North Pacific. Finally, the project will incorporate comparative scholarship on Indigenous resource rights in other regions like Canada and Finland. These broader analyses of Arctic policy and Indigenous sovereignty allow for a comparison of how communities negotiated access to natural resources in the 20^th century. Together, these sources allow the project to integrate environmental, legal, and social histories of fisheries.   

This project contributes to transnational history by highlighting both indigenous agency and the influence of natural resources in multiple spatial contexts. Indigenous actors are central participants in transnational systems. Native Alaskan communities interact far beyond their local communities with U.S. state institutions and, further, with international regulatory frameworks and global environmental movements. Equally important, by examining salmon as both ecological actors and economic commodities, the project demonstrates how environmental processes shape political and economic systems across borders. Lastly, contemporary debates – such as the controversy surrounding the Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay and its environmental, political, and commercial implications– show how resource governance in Alaska continues to involve overlapping interests.   

By asking who has the authority to manage salmon as a natural resource in Alaska, this project leads to further questions. These questions concern the definitions of Native Alaskan sovereignty and resource rights, the dynamics between Alaskan institutions and other actors in the North Pacific ecosystem, shifts in these dynamics in response to environmental and economic pressures, and comparisons between Alaskan salmon management and Indigenous resource right debates elsewhere in the world. By implicating regional Native Corporations, tribal- and community-level Native Associations, federal and state entities, environmental organizations, commercial fishermen, and other nations, fisheries management is more than a domestic issue. International ecological systems, treaties, and comparative Indigenous politics make a purely national analysis insufficient; thus, examining Alaska’s salmon fisheries through a transnational lens offers a powerful way to rethink sovereignty, environmental governance, and Indigenous political agency in the 20^th century.