At the conclusion of today’s Unconference, after successive rounds of collaborative writing, group discussions, and an extremely valuable debate over the superior chocolate in a box of Celebrations (the revisionist position: the Bounty has been widely and quite wrongly neglected in recent scholarship), I find myself feeling unusually optimistic.
Less than a week away from the next deadline, not only do I now feel confident in our ability to crack some of the methodological conundrums that we will be discussing in our essays, but I find I am genuinely excited by the direction of some of our conversations regarding the field of transnational history more broadly.
Within my first group, the conversation was largely to do with our shared interest in the scope for transnational history prior to the late modern era, loosely defined. To indulge in the spirit the day and to free ourselves from the tyranny of multiples of ten, let’s call it the period before 1853.
It appeared very quickly that we shared several ideas amounting essentially to the validity of studying transnational history during this earlier timeframe. These included but were not limited to the idea that, although it was not necessarily a dominant aspect of either personal identity or interpersonal relations, there was at least some kind of national consciousness emerging in European societies during this period, though it will have been conceived and expressed differently at different times and in different spatial or cultural contexts.
Yet again, this led me to thinking— and, forcibly but effectively, to writing —about the need for a closer examination of these emerging solidarities using a transnational lens, an issue with which I have already had a brief encounter in the research and planning of my project proposal. Like Nicholas, I think a lot of my ideas here were inspired by the work of Alison Games, who effectively lights a bonfire under the assumption that early English encounters with distant peoples were dominated by the rationale of different nations or of nationality. However, there is also no doubt in the title of her work that these were English cosmopolitans, however mild or adaptable their connection to their place of origin might have been. And the fact that the nation did not appear to be especially dominant in these exchanges arguably makes it even more interesting when expressions of national identity or the national character of their mission or group do emerge at this time and at these sites.
This leads me nicely onto the subject which I hope to explore in greater detail in my first essay: namely, the construction of space in transnational history. By this, I mean that I want to interrogate the replacement of earlier ‘national’ (and perhaps international) frameworks with an emphatically ‘transnational’ framework which I believe exhibits a number of comparable weaknesses.
Defining his own approach to transnational history in 2008, Erik van der Vleuten lamented that ‘the national histories of the nineteenth century naturalised the nation as the most significant form of human solidarity,’ and, in a move that perhaps encapsulates the mood of the transnational movement, he goes on to ask whether history can unmake what it did so much to make in the first place.
However, I do wonder whether, so far, we have been so preoccupied with unmaking these old assumptions, often focusing on anything but the nation in our attempts to usurp its former dominance, we have forgotten the importance of remaking its history from a new perspective. For in their quest to document more attractive objects of study in the form of transnational lives, spaces, and objects, transnational historians have neglected to re-examine the nation as a historical artefact with a transnational history of its own. And, more concerningly, they have often struggled to reconcile the somewhat limiting scope of ‘transnational’ history with a complex world of connections and migrations not only between the more unitary or, at least, artificially unified entities we would consider nations, but between spaces better understood as composites, borderlands, connected regions, or localities.
Not twenty-four hours ago, these problems would have been frankly terrifying. But today has been a day for challenges, and if our Unconference was any indication, I sense that we are beginning to move from our frantic unmaking of definitions in Week 2 to a gradual but determined remaking.
Bibliography
Erik van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a Transnational History of Technology: Meanings, Promises, Pitfalls’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 974-994. (Quoted from p.982 – thanks to Nick for tracking this down, it’s a brilliant summary, and a very common take on the transnational agenda.)