After doing the readings from week one and two I thought that the discipline of transnational history was starting to become a bit clearer. However, after doing this week’s readings (Conrad in particular) I’ve come to realise that whilst historians of transnational history (such as Bayly) have argued that the purpose of the discipline is to shift focus from the state centric approach to historiography, the nation state still has an important role to play. The seed of this idea was sown towards the end of last week’s seminar where Bernhard mentioned that a potential starting point of investigation could be in the ‘national’. This of course does depend on what you are aiming to investigate, but nevertheless the nation state can still be front and centre when using a transnational approach.
Conrad’s chapters (and book for that matter) uses Germany as the focal point of his investigation. However, what makes it ‘transnational’ is the fact that he uses the example of German reactions to ‘Polonisation’ in comparison to German actions in their colonial settings, and the similarities and differences in their approaches at on the continent and in German colonies. What is striking to me is that Chapter 3 is quite ‘Eurocentric’ as its focus is on the movement of Polish seasonal workers into Germany. But, in a transnational context we see the other nationalities of workers that the German’s wanted to attract to replace the Polish, who they believed to be a threat to German culture.
To some extent the Bose text also emphasises the links between India and the places such as the Middle East, East Africa and South East Asia. Thus, removing the prior assumption I had that nations had a limited role to play in transnational history. Of course, they must be used to enhance our study of transnational flows but are acceptable areas of investigation to the transnational historian.
For me this is quite an exciting prospect regarding the potential directions I could take my project as being in a Scottish University I don’t often get the chance to study Welsh history and what better way than to put it in a transnational context. Recently, I watched a brief four-part BBC documentary on called ‘Wales and the History of the World’, and it sparked some ideas about where I could take my project. And I hope to use Wales as a starting point in planning my larger project. Whether my focus will be on a Welsh individual, an area, mobility of populations or something else is undecided but am looking forward to seeing where I end up.
I’m interested to see what others thought about the readings and how they the think the role of the nation fits into transnational history.