MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

This week’s readings, especially the piece by Nancy Green, were refreshingly critical. Green’s discussion of agency calls for a “historiographic focus on the difficulties embedded in the lived practice of transnationalism” (860). Her recognition of the trials and tribulations of forging transnational connections has been echoed by the social sciences and leads us to question the upbeat tone of transnational history. As Green writes, ““Certainly, we could emphasize the lost-in-translation trials of travel, trunks separated from their owners then, shoes and belts off at airports now” (863), I am reminded of my own experiences as a quasi-expat. Studying at St Andrews as an American, and even more so as an American split between two states, the trials and tribulations of a transnational existence are deeply familiar to me, from delayed flights to visa checks to setting up a UK bank account. Green’s concentration on “the complexity of the transnational situation: how wandering can be wearisome and how transnational ties may lead to complicated [issues and trials]” also highlighted some patterns in Alaska history, what I plan to dive into for our project in this module. Alaska is a difficult place to get to, and its inaccessibility means many things for its unique history. Firstly, Alaska’s status as a difficult territory to access and control bulwarked Native communities from the displacement crises and unmerciful violence inflicted upon thousands of Indigenous peoples by the U.S. Government during the throws of westward expansion of its borders. Native Alaskan communities did suffer horrific wrongdoings – note the notorious forcible evacuation and internment of hundreds of Aleut people from islands in the Aleutian Chain during WW2 – and yet because Native Alaskans have in large part defended ownership over their ancestral lands, their varied cultures have maintained a vibrant presence throughout the state. Alaska’s inaccessibility has also defined its historical character as a place of wilderness in the American imagination. From Jack London to Jack Kerouac, Alaska has captured the imaginations of writers and explorers. The Klondike Gold Rush drew thousands of hopefuls, but many journeys were cut short by the harsh weather conditions and unforgiving terrain of the Last Frontier. The industrial history of Alaska in producing precious resources, like whale oil, gold, furs, and copper, can be attributed in part to their geographic placement in an area which is difficult to access. A transnational view of Alaska recognizes not only its connections between or through other places, but the effort required and the difficulty in establishing those connections. The EUI Global History Seminar Group also brought a critical eye to the transnational approach. Certainly, residents of Alaska qualify as those simultaneously connected and ‘disconnected’ by the global.  

When I first saw the term “transnational history” on the syllabus, i was excited to learn about such a board history, yet I was and remain sceptical. But through the weeks seminars and particularly after sitting with these articles and case studies (finally) I feel like I’ve had a total “loss of innocence,” as the EUI Global History Seminar Group says, regarding how I see our “connected” world. It turns out that transnationalism isn’t just about breezy travel; it’s actually much more “sticky” and complicated than the narrative we are usually sold.

I really felt for the PhD researchers who described their “bitter taste” (l’amaro in bocca), as the EUI Global History Seminar Group says, after realizing that “Global History” often just replicates old power structures; neo-colonialism being one I view as being very fitting. They were debating these grand ideas while staring at each other from “tiny video-boxes” in their kitchens during lockdown, which is such a perfect, ironic image of our isolated reality. They pointed out that while we talk about being global, we usually just default to “Globish,” as Jeremy Adelman says, which is a simplified version of English that keeps elite “Anglophone centres” in charge while everyone else is pushed to the margins.

One of the moments of clarity for me was the metaphor that Nancy Green says: “webs are sticky and also catch flies”. As someone who has rarely travelled, I always pictured living across borders as a luxury, but for many, it becomes a “legal labyrinth,” as Nancy Green says. I learned about people like Gertrude Moulton, who spent years “drifting about in hotels,”. Then there’s Lily, the Duchess of Mecklenburg, who “lost her US citizenship simply by marrying a foreigner,” as Nancy Green says. In today’s climate, thinking about the US and ICE in particular, discussion and clarity regarding movement between borders is vital. Bringing another link between my interest in international relations and transnational history.

In the current climate, “internationalism” takes on an elitist sentiment; if you’re rich and multi-national have homes in different countries, you’re an ‘expat’, if more an immigrant. This is what made Ad Knotters reading so interesting to me. He discusses how “internationalism” primary involved the labouring class. They were a “wandering” lot who used international networks to stop employers from bringing in “strike-breakers” from other countries. My mother, a Nigerian Immigrant and an ex-NHS nurse faced similar parallels in the 21st Century, another sign as to how vital transnational history is for us now.

I found the manner in which Knotter seamlessly weaved a variety of sources into this article impressive. I was especially interested in how Knotter added snippets of memoirs and biographies to their work and briefly went over how that individual’s life exemplified the point they were trying to make. I have noticed that most of the articles we have read in this class that use personal connections usually go much more in depth than Knotter did; however, I still found it effective. 

I also enjoyed Kreuder-Sonnen’s use of biographies and memoirs in her work. Her use of biographies and focus on personal actors was heavier than Knotter’s. Her work alternated between the specific details of the scientists’ lives and their interactions with the transnational and broader national context to highlight how their actions and work highlighted trends within the Polish nation/nationalism. Knotter and Sonnen’s use of biographies and the balance between specifics and larger trends felt somewhat opposite.

I found Knotter’s argument/premise very interesting, especially considering the chapters we read about Polish laborers in Prussia. Knotter argued that these international connections were not really for the sake of internationality, but a pragmatic solution to their employer’s exploitative methods for reducing wages (i.e bringing foreign workers). I am not too familiar with labor history in Europe (besides the chapter we read on Polish workers); however, I find this outcome interesting considering the very violent responses within the United States to drive out foreign competition (usually through extralegal violence). Although there certaintly was collaboration between different laborers from across racial groups, the violence was a very significant part of history of labor in the U.S. There was also a layer of institutional involvement, as the United States government worked with other countries to develop immigration schemes that would balance economic interests and nationalism (for example, the Bracero Program (around the 60s) and the negotiations with China before the immigration ban. The institutions and the nation state had to handle another layer of diplomacy to tackle the racist responses of their citizens. I wonder to what degree colonial racial understandings and discourses influenced and took place within this international Union cooperation that Knotter captured. It would have been an interesting dimension/counterpoint for Knotter to consider.

For me, this week’s reading seems to be a dose of realism into the seemingly bright and forward-looking field of transnational history. As promising as its commitment to thinking beyond methodological nationalism and tracing mobility as well as connection may sound, in practice, transnational historians faced various intellectual and institutional hindrances. First and foremost, there are the things that historians can barely control, namely the geopolitical environment under which they labour. Not only is the archive-hopping demanded by transnational research endeavours both physically and mentally taxing, the growing polarisation in the contemporary world imposed another hindrance on the cooperation of intellectuals and academic institutions across the globe. The unbridled optimism that seemed to have permeated the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall proved to be receding for historians in recent years.

Furthermore, even for those working on transnational/global histories, the marginalisation of the non-West continued to be a daunting obstacle to overcome. As Adelman pointed out, for long, global history has merely been a shorthand for “a story that brought in the Rest to help explain the West”, with the Rest cast always as the Other — previously for its backwardness, now for its menace. With the most prominent global history institutions still based in the West, the core-periphery paradigm continued to be, however unwittingly, perpetuated. This is most lucidly presented in the dominance still of the English language in the historical profession, as historians still preferred the ventriloquism of primary documents in English rather than taking on the task of learning the original language — a perpetuation of the silencing of the subaltern, which hinders them from comprehending the subtleties accessible only in that language. Furthermore, those who do not study the quintessentially “Western” subjects (ranging from Latin America to the African Americans) also enjoy a marginalised presence in academic institutions, either lumped together as “non-Western historians” or placed merely as the footnote underneath those “national behemoths”. It is important to point out, however, that this tendency to alienate the other was not unique to the West. As Adelman noted, in the Japanese academic establishment, there was a similar preference for scholars studying Japanese/Oriental history.

Lastly, while transnational history does not boast of its approach as the paradigm for doing history, its claim of methodological innovation has over time been received with reappraisals from historians. Transnationalism quite rightly aims to go beyond the national paradigm as well as the often-perpetuated European exceptionalism, but are the alternatives proposed necessarily innocuous? The EUI Seminar Group acknowledged that such possible substitutes as Eurasia or the Global South could equally serve to exclude, and that one must concede that “in its [global history] tireless attempt at embracing larger geographies and chronologies, it has to admit that many people (past and present) will not fit within their narratives and that their stories will not be relevant to the vast majority of the 7.7 billion people on Earth”. Similarly, as transnationalism aims to trace hitherto undiscovered cross-border interactions (especially of those individuals living “in-between” lives), it could overstate the extent of cross-border connection and liberty that people enjoyed. As Green calmly pointed out, to see that many borders are porous is dismissing them altogether as irrelevant. Disconnection and limitation that people confronted should be acknowledged as well as the mobility and agency they enjoyed. These intense exchanges over the theoretical merits and limitations of transnationalism very much remind me of the intellectual trajectory of microhistory over the years. As an approach that aims to escape from structural determinism and unwarranted generalisations, it attempts to use the microscopic lens and an intimate reading of primary sources to discover dynamics otherwise not necessarily visible, not least the ground-level agency of human beings. In a way, this sounds strikingly similar to transnational history’s claims. So indeed are the criticisms thereof — microhistory can neglect the importance of systems; the so-called “exceptional normal individuals” might not be so “normal” after all; microhistory might in the end only amount to a meaningless aggregate of disparate experiences. I currently can think of no clear answer on how to deal with the intellectual conundrum confronting historians, but to me it does add further weight to Carr’s description of history as “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”.

If the readings of the previous weeks had highlighted some of the problems faced by scholars in defining and practicing transnational history as a method, I found myself particularly interested by this week’s reading as they offered a new perspective and challenged the ideal and political project of doing transnational and global history. Indeed they all highlighted the limits currently faced by scholars and individuals in achieving such ideals of overcoming eurocentrism, deconstructing hierarchies and highlighting the creation of a global form of citizenship which exceeded national borders. 

Green’s article emphasized the importance of the state apparatus and especially national legal systems which constrain and limit how migrants navigate their everyday lives. Although she focuses on the case of “Americans abroad” in France who represented an elite and privileged social group and were often not even referred to as migrants, her case studies highlight the awkward state of being in between countries and jurisdictions. One can easily imagine how the difficulties faced by such actors, who were sometimes well-connected to important state actors but still unable to make their case heard, are exacerbated in the case of individuals more socially discriminated against. 

However, what I found most interesting was the point made in both Adelman’s article and by the researchers of the European University Institution in their seminar on global history. They both focused on how global history, although it aims at decentralizing history from a western perspective, offering a history of the margins and even deconstructing this dichotomy of the center and the margins, actually reproduced the same hierarchies in its practice. Adelman mentions the globalization of English in the academic field as a way of again integrating the “Other” in western terms rather than their own terms. The EUI researchers highlighted the contradiction of global history as a social project of connecting people and shedding light on “the margins”, and the reality of the field as the object of an economy in which access to scholarly work on global history often necessitates a subscription and financial means which not all institutions can necessarily afford. 

Still, the authors are not entirely pessimistic about the future and transformative potential of global and transnational history and they rather highlight their limits in order to move forward in this field. In that sense, the EUI researchers recommendations were particularly helpful in imagining a future in which  transnational and global history would remain necessary and relevant.

This week’s readings highlighted important potential limitations and advantages of transnational and global history, beyond defining these terms. Nancy Green brings our attention to the nuances underlying migration studies, employing case studies of specific individuals to showcase the occasionally negative impact of transnationalism that the transnational history field often dismisses. These instances of complex international legal cases, gendered citizenship rules, and financial upheaval display how cross-border lives of elite individuals, in these cases in the early twentieth century, were often made worse by global mobility, thus causing Green to caution against an overly celebratory view of transnationalism. Jeremy Adelman, on the other hand, addresses global history and grapples with its potential for forming cosmopolitan, trans-national identities, in the same way that national histories shaped citizens’ nation-oriented identities during a time of rapidly developing nation-states. The (aptly) online article For a Fair(er) Global History points out the irony of these scholars connecting digitally, with inevitable technical issues, from their domestic spaces during the Covid lockdown to discuss global history and global historiographical issues and methods. 

Returning to Nancy Green, upon reading her text I quickly found myself relating her ideas to my other academic work, something I recognize is quickly becoming a theme in my blog posts. Green writes about the ‘a-national citizen’ who is ‘attached everywhere and nowhere’ as a figure whose exposure and exploration is often credited to transnationalism. My current Art History dissertation centers around the 1960s South African photographer Ernest Cole who, upon gaining a passport, exiled himself from South Africa to New York City in 1966. Although this mobility allowed him to escape the violent apartheid state regime in his home country, Cole soon ended up addicted to substances and homeless in New York. This, I argue, could provide another case study that applies to Green’s cautioning of recognizing the negatives that sometimes came from global mobility that we can now study in more depth under a transnational lens. It is also an example of a non-elite, someone who did not grow up with the same privilege and advantages that people like Clara Smith did, whose life was hindered by their cross-border existence. This is a factor which I was hoping Green would explore. Although the demographic she has chosen to use to exemplify her argument may be the most suitable, the article would have been potentially more well-rounded with a preface to this or an attempt to use other demographics as case studies could have been tried. This also relates back to the issues presented by the online article aforementioned, arguing that transnational and global history warrants methodological adjustments. 

The late 19^th, and early 20^th century was a period of dynamic change in Europe, and the world. New developments came, like the existence of the nation state, increased trade in consumer goods, mobility, migration, globalisation, and nationalism. This all created new dynamics, with globalisation, migration and nationalism being clear themes in the Conrad and Valerio’s texts.

Conrad highlights a key of idea of transnational history – its belief that national developments were not simply developed internally but created by the links between European and non-European worlds. He linked this beyond the case study of Germany, but also to the British Empire and its global reach, arguing that traditional British ideas took influences from the wider Empire. I found this particularly interesting, for it linked to my module last semester, in which I investigated the causes and influence of Scottish Migration to New Zealand in the long 18^th Century. There was key evidence of Scots in New Zealand – like the Scottish settlement of Dunedin, or the Highland games. However, there was also plenty existence of New Zealand links in Scotland, the Kiwi specimens we hold in the St Andrews Museum to this day.

Moreover, the paradoxical link between globalisations development from the 1870’s, and the rise in nationalism intrigued me. The increase in Polish workers in Germany and Prussia created fears for the German people that they weren’t filling in labour gaps but taking over culturally. The increased migration and spread of new cultures itself created a deeper entrenchment of German cultures, creating harder borders, and more regulation. We see the impact this had on Poles, with their treatment as ‘foreign’ workers in Germany changing, and its impact on how Polish identity developed, as internal facers of German colonialism, and nationalism.

Finally, I noticed the ever-persistent focus on agriculture to be interesting. Despite the late 19^th century being a time of heavy industrialisation, the need and impact of agricultural workers was something that changed, however never disappeared. This demonstrates the lasting influence of older economic structures.

Conrad’s Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany and Ureña Valerio’s Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities share a common argument, that the German nation was created through the entanglements its constituent populations had with global labour, colonialism, and transnational mobility, rather than through the protection of closed borders.

Conrad is often used to demonstrate how global history reshapes our understanding of the modern nation-state, but in this work he goes further than suggesting that Germany was merely ‘affected’ by globalisation. Global connections appear as a key constitutive factor of the nation itself. His chapters show how nationalisation, racialism, and labour/class politics were moulded, and in some cases produced, through negotiation with foreign movements, markets, and ideals.

The introduction and first chapter present globalisation as a set of overlapping processes that forced Germans to reconsider who could count as part of ‘their’ national community. Similar to how Saunier frames transnational history as a perspective rather than a stable, easily defined method, Conrad uses ‘globalisation’ as a lens to reveal how national practices only make sense in relation to wider systems: emigration to the Americas, immigration from eastern Europe, and competition with other industrial powers.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities similarly traces how ‘internal’ colonisation in Prussia’s Polish provinces shaped colonial consciousness among both Prussian and Polish elites. For Prussian policymakers, techniques developed in the East, expropriating estates, settling German farmers, racialising Polish peasants, were closely linked to the empire’s overseas projects in Africa and Asia. For Polish elites, the same experience of dispossession encouraged visions of national renewal abroad, whether through large émigré communities in Brazil or fantasies of founding a ‘New Poland’ overseas.

In both Ureña Valerio’s and Conrad’s texts, the boundaries of the German nation appear as contingent and revisable, defined by how Germans, Poles, and others were positioned within a wider world. Whether in relation to Polish seasonal workers, imagined Chinese labourers, or German emigrants in Latin America, the nation emerges as a product of global entanglement, shaped as much by what moves across its borders as by what exists within them.

This week’s reading made me rethink what global history looks like in practice. Instead of just being about connections between different parts of the world, it seemed to be more about how power, knowledge and identity are produced through those connections and often in uneven ways. Reading Conrad alongside Valerio showed me that empire is also about controlling movement and producing scientific knowledge as well as defining difference.

What stoof out to me in Conrad’s chapter on Polish seasonal workers was how contradictory their position was. On the one hand, Polish labour was clearly essential to agriculture in Prussia’s eastern probinces, but on the other hand, Polish workers were treated as suspicious and temporary and their movement was heavily regulated by the state. I found this idea of mobility being actively controlled really interesting. Conrad’s suggestion that Prussian Poland functioned almost like an internal colony also stuck with me, blurring the line between European and overseas colonialism in a way I had not really considered before.

Valerio’s work made me think about empire from a different angle as well. The author looks at how medical science, especially germ theory, became tied up with German imperial power. I was particularly struck by how the shift from miasma theory to germ theory was not just sscientific, but also political, as it enabled more surveilance and control over populations. The way disease became radicalised in the colonies and Polish borderlands was unsettling, but also illuminating in terms of how science can reinforce existing hierarchies. At the same time, I appreciate Valerio didn’t present the Poles simply as victims. The discussion of Polish physicians showed that they were actively involved in scientific debates and sometimes used bacteriology to assert their own intellectual legitimacy within the German Empire. This made the picture feel more complicated and less one-sided than I originally expected.

Reading these texts together helped me see how transnational history involves traces the movement of ideas and power alongside the movement of people. Koch’s work on cholera in Egypt and India and the circulation of Polish workers across Prussia both pointed to a world that was already deeply connected in the late nineteenth century. But these connections were clearly shaped by inequality – between Germans and Poles and between metropole and colony.

This week allowed me to see empire from a different standpoint. Rather than only seeing it in terms of territory or economics, I now see it as something that operated through everyday practices like policing borders, defining disease and deciding who belongewd. Conrad and Valerio approach this from different perspectives, but together they show how deeply imperial power shaped both Europe and the wider world.

Conrad’s three chapters for this week shed light onto a fascinating concept that I personally had never considered. As someone typically only exposed to more mainstream historiographical methodologies, it had never occurred to me that the cultural character of a country and their signifying cultural stereotypes could have originated from shared opinions and policies created as a result of growing global interconnectedness, as Conrad points out. Not only did he explain this concept in thorough detail, but he also exemplified how it can be applied by exploring various case studies related to German labour policies and the origins behind the conception of the stereotyped German work ethic. He dispels the assumption, which lies within the term itself, that this idea originated from nationally bounded causes instead of belonging inherently to a part of a more global process; something that becomes almost obvious when considering how conscious individuals were at the turn of the century of global mobility and general globalization processes that were occurring, as Conrad highlights.

Following discovering this particular way of applying transnational historical approaches, it occurred to me how the cultural aspect of the Cold War could be entirely rethought as well. I researched the most renowned transnational historians of the Cold War and came across Odd Arne Westad who has numerous publications about just this idea. Reading the abstract for his article ‘Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third World’, it essentially summarized his exploration into how the Soviet-American conflict in this period increased the potential for revolution in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This has sparked some ideas I have for both my short and long essay. 

It could be helpful to use my short essay to deepen my understanding of theories of revolution during the Cold War era. Eric Hobsbawm would likely be the most obvious and useful option as someone to use as a framework for theorizing the origins of revolutions that occurred globally during the Cold War period and how the Soviet-American conflict drove and impacted these revolutions. This would hopefully provide a strong theoretical foundation for my long essay.

My long essay might look at the impact of these revolutions during and after they occurred and how they influenced ideologies within and across countries that experienced communist and socialist revolutions. Additionally, I could also observe to what extent the collapse of the Soviet Union affected political and social attitudes toward their countries’ revolutions, thus employing more of a transnational historical approach instead of a global historical approach (according to my understanding of their differences). 

Readings this week illustrate the benefits of adopting a transnational lens to scrutinise national pasts. One could argue that approaching history by dividing it into compartmentalised nations can lead to two crucial omissions: first, that of the exogenous formation and shaping of nations; second, that of the complexity underlying the seemingly monolithic “historical reputation” of nations.

As Conrad has elucidated, nationalisation and globalisation, while traditionally having been thought of as being two stages of a linear historical development, are actually concurrent and interlinked. That nations are not only made on their own, but also shaped by (or against) a host of exogenous contexts. The globalising context did not blunt the edge of nationalistic  instead, it has given further impetus to the assertion and celebration of the nation as it confronted external influences. Using the case of the Deutsche Arbeit conception, Conrad showed that even the quintessentially national was defined with respect to both the within and the without. This attention to globalisation’s shaping of the German nation, in a way, echoes other exogenous approaches to nationalism I have seen elsewhere — one apt example would be Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (I happen to be doing my MO3264 review on the work). Here, Colley identified the core question in the making of the British nation on top of existing English, Scottish, and Welsh identities as being not “what we are in common”, but rather “what we emphatically are not”. Hence, it was a host of negative identifications, namely the deep anti-Catholicism and Francophobia enshrined in a series of European warfare, that served to truly bind the disparate populations of the British Isles. Such an emphasis on the exogenous shaping of nations is surely not without its critics, but it does address a crucial dynamic in the shaping of nations that is not necessarily available when adopting a strictly national scope. The transnational approach, therefore, is able to elucidate the factors in the nation-making that lie beyond the confines of the national border. 

Valerio’s work, especially its introduction, also suggests how transnational history can supplement the insufficiencies of national approaches. At times, the lack of scrutiny of transnational interactions in a nation’s history leads us to think of national pasts in monolithic and simplifying manners. When we take such essentialising terms as the “German Empire” and “occupied/Prussian Poland” for granted, we are tricked into thinking that the imperialist enterprise was solely carried out by the Germans for the Germans, while the Poles are consigned to the margins as either passive onlookers or perpetual victims. However, Valerio quite rightly redirected our attention to the subtle interconnection between Poland and Germany, not least by pointing to Polish colonial endeavours (often taking advantage of imperial networks) and engagement in German political, scientific, and intellectual discourse. Crucially, this puts into question the powerful Polish historical self-image as the leading brother among the oppressed, shedding new light on the subject of national memories. In many ways, permeating both intellectual space and public discourse, such matters as national amnesia or difficulty to speak of certain episodes of history (such that would disrupt the grander national self-image) are far more common occurrences than we think — Ireland’s historical victimhood (also that of Scotland perhaps) versus its imperial participation and Great War contributions; France’s celebrated cosmopolitanism versus its infamous “Vichy syndrome” as well as “Algerian syndrome”; furthermore, from my observations, the rhetoric of the “historically peace-loving, non-colonial Chinese people” is also gaining increasing subscribers in contemporary China (not least to boast of some sense of moral superiority over the West), while everyone conveniently forgets how China went from small tribes near the Huanghe to the giant rooster that it now is on the world map over the centuries. Indeed, neither were national approaches the sole perpetuator, nor transnational history the sole corrective to these historical misconceptions. Nevertheless, transnational history — benefiting hugely from its affinity with microhistory — with its attention to hitherto concealed or unnoticed cross-border interaction can help to enrich the picture we currently have of national histories, which can be quite susceptible to unwarranted compartmentalisation and arbitrary essentialisations. 

Growing up competing in geography bees, the boundaries of nations are practically embedded into my brain. Pierre-Yves Saunier, in his book Transnational History: Theory and History, prompts a reevaluation of the sheer durability and the supremacy of nations as ‘units’ of historical analysis and encourages historians to adjust their perspective. In his introduction, Saunier explains the agenda, timeframe, geography, and scope of transnational history. He contrasts Transnational History to Comparative History by metaphorically referring to ‘comparison’ as a ‘tool’. In comparative history, comparison is used by historians to analyze and evaluate historical courses; whereas, in transnational history, comparison is used by historical actors themselves, and the use of this tool in history is what transnational historians seek to study. ‘Comparison’ is a topic of study in and of itself, rather than a tool for studying topics. Saunier’s second chapter, ‘Connections’, extensively references cases and examples to illustrate the multitudinous connectors, connections, and avenues of connection that satisfy the appetite of the transnational historian. The sheer number of examples he lists demonstrates the malleability of a transnational approach. Transnational history, rather than its own history, is the adjustment of one’s perspective, enhancing the capacity of historiography to see between and across national borders. It is similar to examining a topographical map instead of a political map. One shows the color-coded polygons of various states and territories, and the other, though still displaying the titles of these areas, gives precedent to other features of the land – mountain ranges, rivers, basins. It applies a different lens and thus expands one’s understanding of a region. Transnational history gives historians access to a myriad of different lenses. Sometimes a topographical map is not useful. Likewise, sometimes a political map is not useful. Each helps us to see different things. Recently, a friend of mine prompted me to revisit an essay by David Foster Wallace, This is Water. In the essay, Wallace encourages the adoption of an attentive, critical, conscious perspective. Now this perspective is one which views life, not history. But his description of its use resonated with what I read in Saunier’s excerpts. Wallace acknowledges the likelihood that the perspective will not always be suitable to adopt in every situation, but that it has potential to be useful in every situation. In a similar vein, the transnational approach will not always be useful or applicable to each topic but will always have the potential to be so.