On the Advantages of Transnational History

One of the main benefits of transnational history is that it encourages the historian to look outside national borders for their research. Indeed, as history developed as a subject in the nineteenth century alongside the rise of nation states in Europe, there has been a strong tendency for historical analysis to be confined within national borders. While global history tried to challenge the national histories by looking at history on a more global scale, often these works do not focus on global areas. Instead, as Sven Beckert points out in the AHR article, many global histories only cover small areas and so the term ‘global history’ does not seem fitting for them.[1] Now the term ‘transnational history’ is a much better fit for such histories because the term does not claim to be truly ‘global’ in scale. Rather, it aims to look at the interconnection and transfer of ideas between areas perhaps as large as continents or maybe between a few countries. That’s the idea, namely transnational history can undo the constraints of national borders without having the pressure to cover the whole world that comes as baggage with the term ‘global history’. If true, perhaps most historians claiming to write a global history were in fact doing a transnational history all along!

At the other extreme, there is a danger that because transnational history is more internationally focused than national histories, we could lose complexity at the local level. The surge in local and microhistories in the late twentieth century aimed to put the emphasis back onto individuals and local communities. Famous works include Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou which gave considerable agency to local villagers during the 14^th century inquisition. So too, did Christopher Bayly fear that transnational history might lose sight of the realities of experience by ignoring the local.[2] Does this mean that transnational history is just another attempt to make history ‘big’ and ignore the ‘small’?

I would not be so hasty. As the example of OXO shows, transnational history can combine the local and the international. In the reading by Jan Ruger last week, we found out about its local origins with the industrialist Georg Christian Giebert backing the chemist Justus Liebig who invented the meat extract. And, we also found out about its international beginnings where cheap meat was found in Uruguay to produce the meat extract cheaply and was then shipped to Antwerp where it was packaged.[3] To me, this represents the advantage of transnational history, namely that it can combine the local and the global. By focusing on the movement of people across national boundaries, transnational historians can trace the local origins of these people and show their international impact! Without this transnational perspective, it might be tempting to think of the OXO cube as originating from the British company LEMCO and being a distinctly British product.

There is also the question of time and chronology that I found interesting in the reading last week. From a traditionally European perspective, it might be tempting to think of certain events having their origins in Europe. For example, we think of World War Two beginning with Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 or for the Black Death to have begun in 1348. However, if we think from a transnational perspective, we might challenge the chronologies that we were brought up with at high school. Dare we now think of World War Two as beginning in 1937 with Japan’s conflict beginning in China?[4] Could we also think of the Black Death as first starting in 1338 in Central Asia before slowly spreading to Europe ten years later? I should think so. Hopefully now I will start to question the rigid dates and broad general Eurocentric narratives that we were taught in MO1007 and MO1008.

[1] C. A. Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, The American Historical Review 111 (2006), pp. 1445-1446.

[2] Bayly, ‘AHR Conversation’, p. 1448.

[3] Jan Ruger, ‘OXO: Or, the Challenges of Transnational History’, European History Quarterly 40 (2010), pp. 657-662.

[4] Patricia Clavin, ‘Time, Manner, Place : Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly 40 (2010), p. 627.