MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

This week I read Alcade’s work and Dietze and Naumann’s work, both of which offered interesting methodological nuances to the practice of transnational history. Alcade’s text, which focuses on the historiographical shift toward ‘historical space’ as opposed to the mainstream temporal focus, highlights how nation-states and borders need to be discredited from concrete entities determined by physical features but rather should be interrogated as historically constructed arenas. Dietze and Naumann’s text, on the other hand, acted as an intervention to the tendency of transnational historians to assume international or cross-border actors as passive or detached from ties to their local or national influences. This text highlights the need to emphasize, or at least acknowledge in transnational historiographies, that historical actors did in fact carry influences, biases, and knowledge from their place of origin, as well as from their previous cross-border experiences, which ultimately impacted the way in which they operated internationally. 

After reflecting on both texts, which I believe serve complementary critiques and solutions regarding the practice of transnational history, I wondered how I would implement or at least consider implementing these methodological adjustments into my long essay. Since my long essay will center around rock music and Western consumerism and the impact of both on the collapse of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe during the 1980s, I do not think that Alcade’s work will apply as it is mainly grounded in comparative history. Unless, however, I implemented it in another way through focusing spatially on the interaction between the West and Eastern Europe in the same time frame. However, I do think that Dietze and Naumann’s work and its emphasis on actors and how they ‘remain anchored’ to their origins and international experiences could potentially apply to my long essay. By this, I mean that a section of the essay could include exploring how international actors travelling between the West and the Eastern bloc, especially in the case of divided Germany and the Berlin wall, played a role in introducing and exacerbating the presence and popularity of Western consumerism and rock music. I look forward to doing further research and finding substantial sources to see if this can become a considerable argument within my long essay, in which case I will undoubtedly return to Dietze and Naumann for theoretical support, particularly in my short essay.

Transnational history is often presented as a solution to the so-called ‘methodological nationalism’ that was and is prevalent amongst the social sciences. However, Naumann’s Revisiting transnational actors from a spatial perspective and Alcalde’s Spatializing transnational history: European spaces and territories argue that this new methodology is far from something that should be adopted uncritically, and it can itself fall into the same pitfalls as the methodology it was designed to supersede. 

Naumann argues that the ‘transnational’ has begun to increasingly resemble an essentialised ‘sphere of its own’. More specifically, how focusing only on mobility risks turning ‘transnational actors’ into cosmopolitan ‘free agents’, and treating the transnational as something entirely detached from local and national contexts. They instead posit that actors are, no matter their stripe, always present in multiple, layered spaces, the local, the regional, the imperial, and the international.  

Alcalde, meanwhile, connects transnational history and the ‘spatial turn’, arguing that, if done improperly, transnationalism will only replace the nation-state container that once confined how people approached history with new, larger, but still abstract containers, such as Europe, essentially resulting in the recreation of ‘methodological nationalism’ as ‘methodological transnationalism’. He instead calls for a flexible use of scales and spatial units derived from the research question, not assumed in advance.  

Both articles also clarify what makes a source ‘transnational’, arguing that some documents are not magically ‘global’ and others ‘national’, but that, a source becomes transnational when it allows us to trace cross-boundary relations. Such as an activist whose correspondence about a local political or environmental campaign is relayed to an international organisation. Naumann echoes Pierre-Yves Saunier’s metaphor of the ‘historian’s Trojan horses’ to describe sources about actors who migrate between spatial orders, allowing historians to better discover and measure transnational connections. 

Both texts also provide suggestions about how sources can be interpreted transnationally, which can be boiled down to approaching sources from a ‘spatial’ lens: what spaces does the source assume the reader is fluent in, what borders does it cross, and how are its actors positioned socially. Even relatively small sources can be used to reconstruct larger transnational spaces if we simply follow the networks they exist within.  

This week’s readings challenge the positive narrative surrounding transnational actors. Dietze and Neumann show that the “transnational” is not a free-floating space, arguing that actors remain embedded in layered socio-spatial contexts even as they build cross-border connections. Similarly, Alcalde argues that space itself is historically constructed and a territorially organised, hence transnational processes unfold within uneven and contested orders.

I believe this becomes particularly revealing when applied to contemporary short-term missionary trips from Europe or North America to African countries. On the surface these missions seem to embody transnationalism, as these individuals that cross borders to build communities and share their faith operate outside of formal state diplomacy, often emphasising solidarity and humanitarism. Nonetheless, when viewed through this week’s spatial lens, these actors are very much intertwined with structures of power. Mission trips are embedded in institutional church networks, as well as visa regimes and global inequalities that enable certain forms of mobility while restricting others. These participants usually travel from economically privileged states with strong passports and they come into regions marked and often scarred by years of colonial intervention, which coexisted with missionary activity. Their mobility is structured by territorial hierarchies that still remain deeply uneven.

In this sense, transnationalism reveals how differently borders operate for different actors. While for missionaries they might function as manageable crossings, for many locals, their mobility, especially towards North America or Europe, is highly restricted. These cross-border encounters therefore, take place within unequal systems of territorial control.

Furthermore, missionary projects often have universalist claims. For instance, like Esperanto, seeking to transcend national divisions through a neutral language, missionary movements make their mission seem as globally applicable and culturally transferable, but such universalism often emerges from historical and cultural contexts. In this case it is Western Christian traditions shaped by imperial pasts. While it appears as spiritual outreach, it may also reproduce/reinforce older hierarchies of knowledge and development.

Nonetheless, this does not mean that all transnational religious actors are consciously reproducing colonial ideologies, but it underscores the key insights of the readings, arguing that transnational actors are producers of space and these spaces they produce are never neutral. Henceforth, while mobility can connect, it can also platform inequality.

It is then safe to say that transnationalism is not inherently emancipatory, as it is embedded and often asymmetrical, unfolding within the very territorial and histoical hierarchies it sometimes claims to transcend

It is essential that transnational historians engage with space and time in a flexible manner since, in transnational exchange, both time and space can have a different quality. For instance, the phenomenon of technological developments like the telegram or railways significantly affected human understandings and experiences of time and space. Even seemingly simple objects such as postcards carry the potential for exchanges which give participants “a sense of participation in a much wider world than everyday life…allowed”. Alcalde opens his article with a criticism of the emphasis on temporal over spatial dimensions in traditional historical narratives. While there have been efforts in historiography to reconsider periodization, regionality has “remained largely unquestioned”, and historians’ “uncritical allegiance” to the boundaries of nation-states, regions and continents as “natural and self-evident frameworks for historical research” requires a review. Despite a rising awareness of spatiality, visible in the ‘spatial turn’ of the social sciences, the spatialization of transnational history largely remains a task to be done. 

In recent years, however, historians have begun to adopt alternative interpretations of space. Michael Müller and Cornelius Torp (2009), for instance, gave a definition to ‘transnational space’ which promoted a constructivist understanding of space. Roland Wenzlhuemer, on the other hand, proposes a relativistic concept of space in which transnational spaces exist but interact and overlap with other spatial configurations. In yet another approach, Rodogno, Struck (!), and Vogel endorse the notion of the ‘transnational sphere’ in which networks may also be considered spaces.  

The second major move by transnational historians to tackle the epistemological problem of defining transnational space draws on a combination of different scales of spatial analysis, a jeux d’échelles approach. Wenzlhuemer adopts a change in scale of analysis, but historians like Saunier push forward the notion of ‘translocality’, drawing attention to its applicability to situations “that do not involve countries, especially in regions where the national state was a latecomer”. Transnational history shows how configurations of space shape human activity, but as Saunier reminds us, this is also true vice versa. Similarly, Vedran Duancic addresses how physical geographic features can operate as borders “only if historical actors ascribe such function to them”. 

Reflecting back on Pierre-Yves Saunier’s introduction, transnational historians must work with and through, above and under the nation as a unit of historical understanding. Moreover, what this week’s readings illuminate is that transnational historians must go further to work with other units of spatial and temporal understanding as well. In his chapter on methodology, Saunier tasks transnational historians with stretching their spatial imagination through intellectual movement and exercise. Although he suggests that ‘nations’ as historical units and pigeonholes “have shaped too much of modern history to be jettisoned”, he claims that by making a lateral move toward studying ‘smaller countries’ and vertical moves above and beneath ‘the nation’ as a historical unit and by adopting what geographers term ‘scalar logic’. This solution testifies that there is no perfect transnational methodology. Balance seems to be the key here. 

A transnational historian must find order but account for mobility, must integrate a different conception of spatiality but situate their argument within specific contexts, and must not reify space as a given and self-contained framework. Susan Rau’s call for historians to bring their attention to spatial dynamics, perceptions, uses and practices draws on social sciences to raise the bar for how far transnational historians can push understandings of historical spatial configurations. Sebastian Conrad postulates that “no unity of analysis is inherently superior”; there is no perfect methodology for transnational history, and nothing should be treated as a given, but (I think!) this keeps it exciting.  

A question that was presented in my mind with both the European Review of History as well as Pierre-Yves Saunier’s chapter 6 was deceptively simple: where does history happen? The default answer was obvious for a while, history happened within nations and empires or occasionally in continents. These containers were used to categorize events and arrange narratives, however, both readings challenge this idea by arguing that space is not a neutral backdrop for historical narration. Space is something that is constructed, negotiated, and constantly remade by circumstances such as circulation, connection, and interaction.

“Space” needs to be taken as seriously as other historical categories, which is pushed by the European Review of History. There needs to be a step away from treating borders as fixed lines on a map and instead need to distinguish between “borders” and “frontiers”, and between territory as a legal demarcation and the space as a lived, overlapping zone of constant interaction. Economic networks that linked Germany and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century or migrant communities stretching all across North America, demonstrate how historical spaces often do not coincide with specific/ exact political territories: these spaces are layered, polycentric, and relational. Europe is more a space constituted by transnational lines rather than a self-contained entity, as Kiran Klaus Patel suggests.

Saunier proposes the question to historians not just to rethink what we study but how we study it. Transnational history doesn’t need a grand global synthesis detached from archives but rather one that demands deep empirical work. Through the study of people, objects, and ideas across multiple different sites and the reconstruction of their trajectories from primary sources, these circulations will become visible. Transnational history is a research-intensive effort to identify relations that cut across and through conventional units, not just a collage of national histories.

Conrad warns that spatial units should not be the starting point of research but rather an object of inquiry. The nation is something that is shaped by, and shaping, transnational processes, not just a natural container of history. Dossier argues that even the idea of “territory” itself was constructed through imperial expansion, technological change, and geopolitics in recent centuries. Spatializing transnational history requires one to historicize territory rather than discarding it. Historicizing it by showing how it emerged, hardened, and maybe even fractured through the connections historians are seeking to trace.

The main takeaway for me with these readings was the idea to not replace the nation with the globe but to perhaps recalibrate our lens’ as historians. Transnational history reveals a plethora of operations, like how actors move across multiple scales at once, or how chronologies shift when we follow circulations rather than wars, and how spaces overlooked can turn out to be central nodes in larger networks. History produces space. Especially for recent history, it becomes difficult to return to older, container-based narratives of the past so it is important to keep these ideas at the forefront of our research strategies.

Week 5

Both Alcalde’s and Dietze and Katja’s dosseirs address different outlooks on the spatialization of transnational history. Their work discusses scholarly trends that challenge the supposed natural, fundamental, and self-contained nature of spatial units such as the nation-state. In summary, both works argue that spaces are defined and formed through transnational interactions.

Alcalde discusses two methodologies to spatialize transnational history: 1) considering space as flexible and constructivist, and 2) combining spatial scales in a manner that doesn’t challenge established understandings of space directly. Alcalde’s work critically engages with the framework of space and urges historians to study spatial formations, spaces, perceptions of space, spatial dynamics, and spatial practices and uses.

Dietze and Katja’s work, although similarly focusing on spatializing transnational history, narrows in on transnational actors. They critique the previous’ scholarships’ neglect of the rooted element of transnational actors. Not only are these individuals mobile, but they are also rooted within their own regional and local contexts. Thus, they must learn to balance multiple spaces. Not only are these actors connectors, but they have the potential to shape the nation-state in the same way these conceptions of territoriality influence and shape their mobility.

Dietze and Katja’s work reminded me of various dimensions within Kreuder-Sonnen’s work on international scientific exchange and Polish medical experts. Polish physicians such as Bujwid and Ludwik were shaped by national spheres: such as German and French debates on germ theory (in Bujwid’s case forced him to renounce his German teachings to learn from Pasteur), the Tsarist government’s control over Poland’s public health and limitations on Polish leadership, the wider international networks created to address Typhus in the region, and the colonial rhetoric which shaped understanding of Polish regions. The Polish scientists simultaneously shaped these national spheres in an attempt to carve out their own nation state; Bujwid incorporated Parisian and German microbiology and bacteriology in a manner that challenged the Tsarist government’s limits on Polish leadership, Ludwik served as an intermediary in the International committees on Typhus, and Polish scientists responsed to colonial rhetoric and formed their own categorization and distinction (i.e the west and the east).

However, this caused me to think about last week’s readings on how questions of agency could create issues in transnational history. Although the spatialization of transnational history could make history more critical of our understanding of space, I fear that the field would still neglect the people who could not be mobile. After all, the archives do not really feature many individuals who were left behind in transnational history — how can we reconstruct if and how their interactions informed transnational spaces and how they interacted with the “less” significant and more local scales?

I found this week’s key reading particularly inspiring in their challenging of the perception of space in history as being a given notion and their effort to bring to the fore studies which questioned such ideas and offered alternative ways of thinking about spatialization. 

In the conclusion of his article, Alcalde emphasized once again that “History not only takes place in a given space; it also makes both place and space.”. This statement reminded me of an article I read for an IR course which I found particularly interesting in how it highlighted historical processes of construction of space and more specifically land as well as the role of those processes in shaping current processes of decolonization in a context of climate emergency and environmental crisis.

I thought I would explore this article, written by K. Reibold and titled ‘Settler Colonialism, Decolonization, and Climate Change’, as an example of how some scholars have started to challenge spatialization. In this article, Reibold demonstrates how a specific conception of land and especially a specific ethnogeography, which she defines as the combination of a specific ontology of land with specific land-use patterns defined by the same ontology, were imposed by western settlers onto indigenous populations. This western ethnogeography still serves as a framework as of today in the sense that processes of decolonization such as land retributions are made accordingly to this specific conception of land and thus renders those same processes void. For instance, she explains that western conceptions of land as only relating to issues of property have led to forms of reparations through the giving back of land. However in many indigenous ethnogeographies, the relations to the land and its many components are central in creating sociality and kinship and thus restitution of the land doesn’t necessarily allow the reparation of those destroyed relations, even worse, the current environmental crisis leads to the ongoing unmaking of those relations and the inability to practice specific land-use patterns for those populations. I found this article particularly interesting in how it highlights the construction of space and how looking beyond western notions of land or studying how those became more hegemonic can bring to the fore new issues worth investigating. In terms of transnational history I also think this example really highlights how conceptions of space also circulated and were made or unmade through connections. It also highlights how various conceptions of space can exist and compete within one seemingly singular area, which are revealed by studying the way actors define space. 

Saunier’s writing on the methodology of transnational history was particularly inspirational to me. The interdisciplinary aspiration of transnational history by his elucidation of its rich “toolbox” — not least how it could benefit from closer cooperation with historical archaeology and mapping, both of which I have strong resonance with. The ability of historical archaeology to trace objects in circulation is particularly valuable to transnational history as it allows us to see cross-border connections in a materialised way. I still recall my fascination when I saw that objects and artefacts from all over the world have been dug up from the River Thames by “mudlarkers” while I was at the “Secret of the Thames” exhibition by London Museum Docklands last May — as a Chinese born and bred I never expected to find a green sexual pleasure device (the most decent way I can put it) from Qing China being discovered on the shore of the Thames. The benefits of mapping/the spatial dimension in helping elucidate historical developments were also deeply felt when I was reading A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland where the authors mapped the movement, violence and casualties of Ireland’s populations from local to national scales from the plantation era to the more recent Troubles, thereby investigating whether Irish society — security, wealth, migration — was “rigged” in any spatial manner. In transnational history, as historians look to both supranational and sub-national scales, mapping would have decidedly far greater promise, not least in tracking people and objects in movement. 

Saunier also mentioned the concept of “translocality”, which to me seems a highly rewarding concept — though at times its application can be problematic. When I first encountered this term last week, I was deeply intrigued by its emphasis on the interconnection between different localities that break the traditional national paradigm by which we think of connections. In many ways, it reminds me of Jürgen Osterhammel’s argument on modern cities’ role as both vertical and horizontal connectors — vertically, they are the centre of their immediate hinterlands; but at the same time, they possess deep horizontal connections with other urban centres. Applying this train of thought to transnational history, translocality allows us to think more in terms of such horizontal associations. Perhaps we should actively explore how cities like Glasgow and Bristol may have been associated with Britain’s colonial empire abroad (or the broader global colonial market), rather than placing them within the compartment of England, Scotland, or the United Kingdom. That said, I can’t help but ponder if the concept of translocality (and in some way transnationalism in general) is always beneficial and serves to nuance the conventional wisdom in historiography. There surely exists the hegemony of “methodological nationalism”, but are there cases where this “transnational” scope — and very often an Euro/Western-centric one — has been dominant? I am indeed making very ungrounded assumptions here, but when I think of such imperial enclaves such as Hong Kong, it always seems to me that people have often paid more attention to their transnational connection with the imperial metropole than with their geographic immediacy. In the case of Hong Kong, in relation to its financial role as a free port and the symbolic status that its handover in 1997 possessed as the end of the British Empire, its close and concrete connection with Canton seemed to have enjoyed a far less prominent existence — not least the latter’s crucial water supply to Hong Kong, which was a major reason why the whole of Hong Kong, rather than just the New Territories, which was under a 99-year lease, was handed over to China. Thus, one can say that there might also have been transnationalist biases in some sphere of historical inquiry, especially in studies of non-West colonial outposts. And in blindly furthering the transnational connection (linking them back to the West) in such cases, historians, instead of fulfilling transnationalism’s commitment to the multiplicity of scales and perspectives, might just have been perpetuating what Adelman called the use of “Resterners” to explain the West under the guise of global history. In so doing, they effectively reduce such places to footnotes of Western imperialism, thus neglecting the local associations they had. Again, all this is just based on my very partial impressions, but I do believe a degree of self-reflexivity is indispensable to the advance of transnationalism as a historical approach. 

I really enjoyed this week’s readings and appreciated the critical approach they took to the field of transnational history. I had previously been in a bit of a self-made bubble, completely unaware of possible limitations and downsides to transnational history as it has been practiced.

First, considering Nancy L. Green’s The Trials of Transnationalism, I found her analysis of what someone living a ‘transnational life’ actually looked like interesting and thought provoking. I hadn’t previously considered that transnationalism wasn’t just a lens, but an experience that real people lived. And while I was initially skeptical of Green’s critiques, finding them too micro, within the contexts of the other readings I realized that Green’s point wasn’t that these people’s lives need to dictate the rest of the field, but rather that by understanding the struggles, the transnational field can begin to move away from a glorifying narrative. As Green points out, there are hardships both practically and emotionally that can come with people living transnational lives, and while the potential for cultural, social, and intellectual exchange transnational lives bring to the world, historians should not neglect one for the other.

Moving on to the other two articles by Adelman and the EUI Global History Seminar Group, the shortcomings they articulated about transnational history I think are important to consider as we as a class continue to engage in transnational studies. Though the ideals of global history and transnational history are very promising, Adelman’s critique of global history creating language hierarchies, and the EUI’s seminar group pointing out the continuous recreations of Wallerstein’s world systems model, the field of global and transnational history still has a long ways to go as it continues to develop and grow.

I think that many of the critiques made however are applicable to the discipline of history as a whole. The EUI seminar group discussed the inaccessibility of articles put behind paywalls or institutions. Adelman’s urge for historians to listen to ‘the other half of the globe’, I think are things that should be talked about in other classes as well as this one.

Kreuder-Sonnen’s article on bacteriologists and epidemiologists in Eastern Europe, and Poland post-World War 1 gives us insights into the dynamics of transnational history, and the changing role of science in nation-states in the early 20^th century.

The Case study of Odo Bujwid provides insights into the transnationality of science during his time. Bujwid was introduced into the Robert Koch’s ‘German’ style of Bacteriology, that competed with Louis Pasteur’s French vaccination techniques. Kreuder-Sonnen notes that the competition between these was perceived to be a national one. Despite this, Bujwid’s ability to adapt to Pasteur’s techniques, allowing him to learn from him, allowed him to take his new techniques back to Warsaw, with his new vaccinations proving vital for public health. Bujwid didn’t allow national competition to interfere with his goals of scientific progress. Furthermore, he didn’t name his own work as specifically ‘Polish,’ for his goal was not national development through science, but the transnational combination of techniques to develop science and medicine further. This contrasts the dynamics post WW1, where Poland became a state, and science and medicine became a way to legitimise the nation and gain global acceptance.

Furthermore, Knotter’s work looks into transnationality of cigar makers, particularly in Europe. Knotter explores the development of the national, and how labourers, and cigar makers used international cooperation to try and aid their strikes and prevent foreign labour taking jobs. This was a key move in international cooperation and helped improve worker conditions. Moreover, we see the spread of cigar workers, and their ideas, with the circulation of cigar makers in Europe, and the permanent move of many to the states. Ideas also spread, like the infamous ‘reader,’ who was common in cigar factories.

Both these texts use a similar method. they don’t start with abstract transnational theories or ideas, but use specific groups and case studies, and follow their movements across border, with these micro-histories allowing us to spot larger patters. Thus they highlight how transnational history is harder to see from the nation state, however when we track people, ideas, and skills, it becomes clear that they are the evidence that makes transnational histories more visible.

Adelman’s Is Global History still possible, or has it had its moment?, Green’s The Trials of Transnationalism, and the EUI collective text For a Fair(er) Global History all grapple with the question of whether global and transnational history can survive the apparent unravelling of the liberal order that once seemed to make them possible.” 

Adelman’s piece was written during a period of great crisis for globalisation, financial meltdown, retreating integration, and the return of ethnonationalism, it asks whether Global History was too closely tied to flash-in-the-pan optimism about globalising victories in the 80s and 90s. Adelman points at 2006 as the period when scholars ‘jumped’ on the new globalising world dreamed of and spearheaded by economists and politicians, a scant few years before it began to collapse. Reactionary political movements both Western and ‘Restern’ arose against this Globalism, and the ‘provincial’ elements of the West began to radicalise against the liberal cosmopolitanism that was being built, one that, to them, marginalised or even abandoned them entirely. But, he does not call for an abandonment of global frames; instead, he urges global historians to take these concerns more seriously, to engage with them and attempt to convince them, rather than accelerate ahead without them.  

Green, by contrast, focuses overwhelmingly on transnationalism. She shows how the term grew and proliferated from a term used by an American politician in defence of immigrants, to a necessary weapon against ‘methodological nationalism’, a label for the cross-border nature of migration, and something near-synonymous with globalisation itself. This exact flexibility, she insists, ensures transnational history is not an ‘easy’ discipline, it demands a careful specification of scale, angles of analysis, and the connections of existing historical actors. She provides a more grounded, though perhaps at the expense of limiting its reach, use of the concept, in contrast to overly ambitious attempts to make everything ‘transnational’, and reactionary attempts to discard it entirely.  

Meanwhile, the EUI seminar text goes further than either Green or Adelman in terms of philosophising Global History by arguing that it must take on a ‘fair(er)’ form. Writing during COVID, the collective authors provide a reflection on the impact that studying Global History from Zoom boxes and the hardest closed borders the world had experienced in many years had on both themselves and their understanding of it as a concept. The programme makes little attempt to provide a unique definition for Global History as a practice, and instead puts forth an argument in favour of re-balancing its focus. It argues that attempts to combat Eurocentrism have only resulted in ‘Eurasian centrism’, that further diversification in terms of references, power relations, and collaboration are necessary to provide a better, fairer, method of analysis. 

Altogether, the texts argue that global and transnational history have not ‘had their moment’, but that these disciplines must adapt to the times, to critically engage with their outside detractors, and to reform its internal elements that are in need of reform.  

This week’s readings prompted me to think about one of the most visible contemporary expressions of transnational life, which would be digital nomads. Having travelled to Bali and noticing the place filled with expats living ‘borderless’ lives on Instagram (working from beach cafes, moving freely between countries, or just seemingly embodying the cosmopolitan future that global history once promised). Yet, as Green reminds us, transnationalism is not as easy as it looks. She urges historians to focus on the difficulties embedded in the lived practice of transnationalism, warning against overly celebratory narratives of mobility. Applying her critique to digital nomads thus complicates their image as global citizens. Their monbility depends on highly-ranked passports, visa regimes desgined to attract westerners and their income, a stable internet infrastructure, and, above all, the lingua franca – English. Their transnationalism is thus structurally enabled rather than simbly being agency.

The EUI Global History Seminar Group similarly critiques the pwoer structures embedded in global history itself. They highlight how English dominance and Anglophone institutions shape what counts as ‘global’. Likewise, digital nomadism seems to mirror this pattern. Many nomad hubs operate primarily in English/are forced to change and operate to cater towards these Westerners. Much like global history’s centres, these enclaves reproduce hierarchies instead of dissolving them.

Adelman’s reflection on the rise and retreat of globalist optimism also caught my interest. The early 2000s celebrated integration and comopolitanism. Digital nomads might appear to be the continuation of this moment (the human embodiment of border-crossing enthusiasm), but Adelman asks who is left out of global narratives. In places like Bali, rising rents and service economies catered towards foreign remote workers raise questions about uneven integration. Hence, mobility for some may mean structural fragility for others.

In this sense, digital nomads resemble eariler figures of elite mobility, such as those mentioned in Green’s article – Americans in 1920s Paris. Thus, transnational life has for a long time (always?) been easier for some than others.

If global history sought to dethrone the nation-state as the central unit of analysis, digital nomadism suggests that borders still matter, revealing how deeply mobility is structured by nationality, currency, language, and global inequality. Perhaps, then, this week’s readings might suggest borders are still very much relevant, just differently for different people.

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.