Furthermore, even for those working on transnational/global histories, the marginalisation of the non-West continued to be a daunting obstacle to overcome. As Adelman pointed out, for long, global history has merely been a shorthand for “a story that brought in the Rest to help explain the West”, with the Rest cast always as the Other — previously for its backwardness, now for its menace. With the most prominent global history institutions still based in the West, the core-periphery paradigm continued to be, however unwittingly, perpetuated. This is most lucidly presented in the dominance still of the English language in the historical profession, as historians still preferred the ventriloquism of primary documents in English rather than taking on the task of learning the original language — a perpetuation of the silencing of the subaltern, which hinders them from comprehending the subtleties accessible only in that language. Furthermore, those who do not study the quintessentially “Western” subjects (ranging from Latin America to the African Americans) also enjoy a marginalised presence in academic institutions, either lumped together as “non-Western historians” or placed merely as the footnote underneath those “national behemoths”. It is important to point out, however, that this tendency to alienate the other was not unique to the West. As Adelman noted, in the Japanese academic establishment, there was a similar preference for scholars studying Japanese/Oriental history.
Lastly, while transnational history does not boast of its approach as the paradigm for doing history, its claim of methodological innovation has over time been received with reappraisals from historians. Transnationalism quite rightly aims to go beyond the national paradigm as well as the often-perpetuated European exceptionalism, but are the alternatives proposed necessarily innocuous? The EUI Seminar Group acknowledged that such possible substitutes as Eurasia or the Global South could equally serve to exclude, and that one must concede that “in its [global history] tireless attempt at embracing larger geographies and chronologies, it has to admit that many people (past and present) will not fit within their narratives and that their stories will not be relevant to the vast majority of the 7.7 billion people on Earth”. Similarly, as transnationalism aims to trace hitherto undiscovered cross-border interactions (especially of those individuals living “in-between” lives), it could overstate the extent of cross-border connection and liberty that people enjoyed. As Green calmly pointed out, to see that many borders are porous is dismissing them altogether as irrelevant. Disconnection and limitation that people confronted should be acknowledged as well as the mobility and agency they enjoyed. These intense exchanges over the theoretical merits and limitations of transnationalism very much remind me of the intellectual trajectory of microhistory over the years. As an approach that aims to escape from structural determinism and unwarranted generalisations, it attempts to use the microscopic lens and an intimate reading of primary sources to discover dynamics otherwise not necessarily visible, not least the ground-level agency of human beings. In a way, this sounds strikingly similar to transnational history’s claims. So indeed are the criticisms thereof — microhistory can neglect the importance of systems; the so-called “exceptional normal individuals” might not be so “normal” after all; microhistory might in the end only amount to a meaningless aggregate of disparate experiences. I currently can think of no clear answer on how to deal with the intellectual conundrum confronting historians, but to me it does add further weight to Carr’s description of history as “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”.
Week 4 Blog