The sheer scale and ambition of transnational history initially seems to restrict the potential of the individual as a level of analysis. Though an essential part of what we can conceive as being ‘transnational’ in character is the individual human actor, individuals are but one in a list of forces from ideas, institutions, capital and language (to name a few) that cross national boundaries. The temptation to go beyond the nation as the central unit of historical analysis can run the risk of losing sense of the complexities and impact of people and events at a local level. However, thinking about the readings done so far, it seems that a key benefit to doing transnational history is the potential to interweave the individual and the transnational in historical analysis.
Beginning her article Defining Transnationalism, Patricia Clavin uses the example of the German Jew Julius Moritz Bonn, and his diverse life experiences – as an agent in the League of Nations, a professor in several countries and a travelling propagandist – to demonstrate that transnationalism is ‘first and foremost about people’. The patterns of his life symbolised the ‘cosmopolitanism of the inter-war period’. Yet Clavin also points to how individuals do not merely symbolise transnational history but also shape the nature of transnational events, people she refers to as ‘somebodies’. The potential impact of individual agency features in her discussion of ‘border crossings’ and her reference to Aida Hozic’s article detailing how merchants in nineteenth-century Europe were able to exploit the western Balkans as a ‘dual periphery’ for illegal trade – resurrecting old routes from the late Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires (Hozic, 2006: 244).
The individual also has a unique and flexible role in relation to a central issue/theme of transnational history – and that is how to address the ‘nation’. Transnational historians have clearly differed in the extent of their abandonment of the nation-state framework, partly influenced by the subjects they are researching. The cultural approach to transnational history in particular has found it difficult to shake off the national container, with trends like ‘glo-cal’ history showing how individuals engaged in international relations and foreign policy naturally ‘reflect the culture of their nation-state’ (Clavin, 2005: 437). Jan Rüger’s article on the development of the OXO meat cube further shows this in how certain key people like Lord Hawke made the previously transnational character of the product an increasingly British one in the run up to 1914.
It is in this context where transnational history has further benefited from the insights of other social sciences like political science. Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on nations as ‘Imagined Communities’ comes to mind here. Though in name this work seems to be another quintessential 20th century nation-centred historiographical account, in offering an account of the nation as a cultural construct he was able to show how local communities defined aspects of their nationalist movements through transnational influences, Creole groups being particularly relevant in this context.
Initially we can see how tempting it can be to situate the ‘individual’ as a cog in the larger machine of analytical frameworks of space and scale used by transnational historians. However, in its focus on the ‘go-betweens’ of an increasingly connected modern historical landscape, the forces which flow between and within established constructs like the ‘nation’ or ‘empire’, transnational history can use the individual to its unique advantage. Individuals clearly do have agency in reality to shape transnational outcomes, they are certainly affected by them as well, and lastly, we must not forget that they too have their own perspectives and conceptions of what was beyond the nation in their time.
An individual-centred analysis provides us as historians with a lot of difficult methodological questions to grapple with, yet so long as the openness of transnational history as a historical perspective remains (and doesn’t succumb to splintering), it also offers us potential to discover greatly rewarding insights that can help build the future of the field.