A common concern among transnational historians is the use of transnational history. For many, it seems transnationalism is becoming a buzzword for a progressive perspective of history. Ulrike Lindner article “Transnational movements between colonial empires: migrant workers from the British Cape Colony in the German diamond town of Lüderitzbucht” offers an interesting to way to explore this. Openly, Lindner acknowledges that geographic space under investigation, the ‘demarcation’ between colonial borders in south west Africa is not transnational if the definition provided by David Thelen is considered to be gospel. This is because the political entities under investigation were not nation states but colonies.[1]
This is of particular interest to myself, as my project is based in the early 17th century. Ideas of nationhood were yet to develop. Does this mean that like Lindner I can’t write a transnational history? The answer for me is not as simple as yes or no. Lindner states that her work is transnational, for the areas under discussion were heavily influenced by British and German colonial administrations shaped by two different national perspectives. Although, this is supported by Kiran Klaus Patel argument for national consciousness as defining factor of transnational history, it is not entirely convincing.[2] Terminology such as translocality may have been more appropriate to explore regional colonial administration, rather a suggesting a more national, universal approach to colonial policy.
Transnational history has created a new way to view history, its emphasis on movement and interconnectedness resonating in a world which has an increasingly global outlook. It is, therefore, understanding why historians such as Lindner want to utilise it, for it emphasis interaction and cooperation. This is why I find the article so engaging, as it successfully explores the interaction and movement of ‘Capeboys’ within the British and German colonial governments of south west Africa. Comparable to my work in the fact that I want to explore English merchants in relation to the Japanese and other European trade companies within Hirado, Japan. However, I am uncertain whether to call this transnational history.
I would argue that translocality is a better fit for future historical
investigation. Admittedly it doesn’t have the ring of transnational history,
but it opens up the historians’ perspective to so much more. By stating that
the study is transnational in nature, the historian automatically places
boundaries on their investigation. Translocality, on the other hand, offers a flexibility
in perspective that not only allows for exploration the nation but other scales
and spaces within history. This is reflected in the questions raised within the
article ‘Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa’, suggesting the possibility
that people can operate in multiple temporal frame works as well as highlighting
the blurred boundaries in thematic history such as between Afro-Asianism, imperial
and Cold War frame works.[3]
[1] Lindner, Ulrike. “Transnational Movements between Colonial Empires: Migrant Workers from the British Cape Colony in the German Diamond Town of Lüderitzbucht.” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne D’histoire 16, no. 5 (2009): 680.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective (2018), ‘Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa’, Radical History Review, 179.
I share the anxieties you hold about the applicability of ‘transnationalism’ to spaces and times where historical experience was determined not so much by the nation, as by empires or city states, for example. Like yours, my project seeks to address circulations, movements, flows etc. before the rise of the ‘modern’ nation-state in the mid-nineteenth-century, and I do speculate about how far these circulations could be termed ‘transnational’ in the eighteenth-century (the period to which I address in my project).
I would stress, first, that there is no agreement on the applicability of ‘transnationalism’ to periods of history that predated 1850. While, for example, Patel argued that historians who speak about the phenomenon for those times, ‘either [use] an anachronistic fashion label’, or manipulate ‘an essentialist understanding of nation’, Casalilla (the most expressive advocate of the approach I could find) emphasized first, that all historians – modern, early modern, or mediaeval – hold the ‘right to use the methods of transnational history’. Second, she argued that by using Anderson’s ‘Imagined Community’ paradigm to recognize the existence of the pre-nineteenth-century ‘natio’, historians might avoid the type of anachronism that Patel referred to. Even among the experts, there is no consensus on ‘transnationalism’ in the pre-‘modern’ world. In some ways, that disagreement gives me reason to justify the phenomenon in my work, and it seems that the best way forward could very simply be to historicize the ‘nation’ and respect its heterogeneous forms in space and time.
It gets tricky (as you emphasize) at colonial peripheries however; at spaces (inter-imperial for example) in which networks could form in-between and across non-metropolitan borders. I’m still not quite sure about the semantics involved in dealing with these. Certainly, it is difficult to delineate inter-colonial ‘flows’ and ‘circulations’ as ‘transnational’ when those same ‘flows’ did not transcend ‘national’ boundaries, but colonial borders instead. One way in which we might overcome this challenge is, quite simply, to acknowledge that they nonetheless did transcend ‘national’ peripheries – those still informed by national consciousnesses, policies and practices. That approach might sound overly simplistic, and it probably is; but I struggle to see what other term(s) we might employ to define inter-colonial ‘transnantionalisms’.
I also (and this likely isn’t helpful to you) reject ‘translocal’ as a frame of reference for inter-colonial ‘flows’ etc. I think its value lies in describing connections between non-western spatio-temporal contexts in which peoples did not organize themselves with reference to the Eurocentric concept of the ‘nation’: I don’t think ‘translocal’ should be used to describe inter-colonial ‘transnationalisms’. It really comes into its own because it acknowledges the uneven process of ‘national’ development among non-European peoples, but where ‘flows’ and ‘circulations’ existed between European colonials (between nationals whose nations were comparable in stages of national development), I don’t think ‘translocal’ is useful in the same way.
I’m still then searching for an appropriate term that might describe inter-colonial interconnectedness.
Casalilla, Bartolomé Y., ‘Transnational history. What lies behind the label? Some reflections from the Early Modernist’s point of view’, Culture & Digital Journal 3 (2014), pp. 1 – 7.
Casalilla, Bartolomé Y., ‘“Localism”, Global History and Transnational History: A reflection from the historian of early modern Europe’, Historisk Tidskrift 127 (2007), pp.659 – 678.