Week 1 Blog

I found these initial readings for the module very compelling. Patricia Clavin’s definitions of various terms including transnational history, global history, and international history, provide the reader with an excellent foundation for further understanding these terms and how to recognize them and grapple with their purpose in various fields of historical research. The problem of periodization that Clavin highlighted is one that I have been exposed to in my earlier time as a history student and am thus somewhat familiar with. However, it was interesting to hear how the problem of periodization is also something that transnational historians are involved in. The idea that, for example, the recognized marker for the beginning of World War I can be argued is euro-centric and ignoring relevant phenomena outside of Europe is one that has stuck with me since reading Clavin’s text. I entirely agree that, in light of this point, much of the West’s periodization can be found to be euro-centric and guilty of perpetuating a damaging tendency towards euro-centrism generally in historical approaches. On this spectrum, I have been considering Jan Ruger’s text and how it pinpoints certain weaknesses or potential weaknesses in transnational history; one being that it perhaps ignores traditional methodologies that work or that it dismiss national boundaries in historical questions when in fact, these boundaries are fundamental to the questions or issues at hand. My takeaway, which Ruger ultimately concluded with as well, is that transnational history is an important historical approach for widening our scope of historical phenomena. However, if used just for the sake of it and without careful consideration as to what one is applying it to, the approach has the potential to discard important factors of the area of history it is looking at and thus the approach loses its purpose and value. Therefore, returning to Clavin’s point, it seems beneficial that historiographical problems such as periodization are put under a transnational light in order to move away from unnecessary national boundaries and euro-centric narratives. In this sense, it appears vital to apply transnational history to historiographical instances where traditional methodologies are clearly not working. The question then becomes, however, to counter Ruger’s argument, what are ‘traditional’ questions or narratives and when can we say that they are not working within a ‘traditional’ historiographical framework? I look forward to exploring this question further as the module develops and my knowledge of transnational history, and global history, grows.