Rüger’s OXO: A Victory of and for Transnational History

You are ten, maybe eleven weeks into your final semester of sub-honours-level history. And, although the town has been left feeling curiously post-apocalyptic after weeks of snow, ice, and bitter pensions disputes, you’re clinging to your last few tutorials as if they are all you have in the world. You check the time on your phone. You should probably get going.

It’s the time of day again when, as usual, you find yourself checked onto that strange and constant conveyor belt of students, beginning somewhere close to ALDI, that trundles slowly along Largo Road towards the roundabout (which, after a heated discussion with my housemates, I am forced to conclude is probably better known by its proximity to the Whey Pat than by its looming mediaeval gate), there to widen and scatter its many passengers into the older, prettier, and pricier heart of the town.

You make it to St Katharine’s Lodge with a minute or two to spare.

Your tutorial passes surprisingly quickly for class with approximately three surviving students in it. In the last five minutes, you turn to the number of next week’s reading and are pleasantly surprised to find Global History printed across the top of the page. Well, you suppose at the very least it might be a little more outward-looking than the Whigs, whigs, and the whiggish.

You flip through the section— it’s narrow enough, some small print, but nothing completely monstrous that jumps out at you. What about the readings? You recognise Christopher Bayly, maybe one or two others. But there are no three-hundred-word article titles, no indecipherable jargon, and nothing longer the thirty pages including endnotes. All in all, not a bad lot.

And then the hammer blow.

If you were hoping for more of the transnational side of things, read Jan Rüger.

Okay. Fair enough. Who’s Rüger?

It’s a really interesting microhistory. He looks at the history of the OXO cube and sort of uses it to…

We’re going to be reading about stock cubes. Right.

I never thought I’d find myself sitting at a computer trying to contrive a metaphor adequate to frame the friendly stock cube as a hard and bitter pill, but suffice to say, I wasn’t terribly excited about it.

And then I actually read it.  

One year later, I’m enrolled onto a transnational history module, and Jan Rüger appears on the reading list. If you would like my review, in a sentence?

I read it again.

And I looked forward to it. Because in that strange, witty little article, there is a wonderful amount to learn, and not only in its material and human examples: of a Bavarian inventor and a shrewd founder with a host of transnational connections, of Uruguayan cattle meat purchased at a third of the European price and an idea which might never have been realised without the cashflows and credit of the powerful London stock exchange.

No, there is not much extraordinary about the story of OXO, in a world which Rüger himself acknowledges was rapidly learning to connect the dots between its various human and natural resources, scattered across the globe, often in ways that were controversial and destabilising.

However, there is plenty that is exemplar in the historian’s approach to the topic: his engagement with the meaning of transnational history, by neither excluding nor privileging the national story, which he shows us constitutes only one dimension of the OXO example (though still an important dimension if we are to engage critically with the concept of nations at all) is the most obvious example.

Finally, and I would suggest most importantly, Rüger reminds us that it is important, as we discover new ways of looking at our world, not to become too embroiled in our conclusions to make the same error as more traditional approaches that we often come to frown upon.

Ask new questions, yes. But as we advance in this new field and refine this new approach, let us not lose sight of the old questions and approaches. Let global historians engage with microhistories. Let transnational historians continue the study of nations, incidentally or otherwise.

For clearly, this is the surest way to generate a conversation between newer and older histories. And surely that, most of all, is what keeps our discipline alive.