Saunier’s writing on the methodology of transnational history was particularly inspirational to me. The interdisciplinary aspiration of transnational history by his elucidation of its rich “toolbox” — not least how it could benefit from closer cooperation with historical archaeology and mapping, both of which I have strong resonance with. The ability of historical archaeology to trace objects in circulation is particularly valuable to transnational history as it allows us to see cross-border connections in a materialised way. I still recall my fascination when I saw that objects and artefacts from all over the world have been dug up from the River Thames by “mudlarkers” while I was at the “Secret of the Thames” exhibition by London Museum Docklands last May — as a Chinese born and bred I never expected to find a green sexual pleasure device (the most decent way I can put it) from Qing China being discovered on the shore of the Thames. The benefits of mapping/the spatial dimension in helping elucidate historical developments were also deeply felt when I was reading A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland where the authors mapped the movement, violence and casualties of Ireland’s populations from local to national scales from the plantation era to the more recent Troubles, thereby investigating whether Irish society — security, wealth, migration — was “rigged” in any spatial manner. In transnational history, as historians look to both supranational and sub-national scales, mapping would have decidedly far greater promise, not least in tracking people and objects in movement.
Saunier also mentioned the concept of “translocality”, which to me seems a highly rewarding concept — though at times its application can be problematic. When I first encountered this term last week, I was deeply intrigued by its emphasis on the interconnection between different localities that break the traditional national paradigm by which we think of connections. In many ways, it reminds me of Jürgen Osterhammel’s argument on modern cities’ role as both vertical and horizontal connectors — vertically, they are the centre of their immediate hinterlands; but at the same time, they possess deep horizontal connections with other urban centres. Applying this train of thought to transnational history, translocality allows us to think more in terms of such horizontal associations. Perhaps we should actively explore how cities like Glasgow and Bristol may have been associated with Britain’s colonial empire abroad (or the broader global colonial market), rather than placing them within the compartment of England, Scotland, or the United Kingdom. That said, I can’t help but ponder if the concept of translocality (and in some way transnationalism in general) is always beneficial and serves to nuance the conventional wisdom in historiography. There surely exists the hegemony of “methodological nationalism”, but are there cases where this “transnational” scope — and very often an Euro/Western-centric one — has been dominant? I am indeed making very ungrounded assumptions here, but when I think of such imperial enclaves such as Hong Kong, it always seems to me that people have often paid more attention to their transnational connection with the imperial metropole than with their geographic immediacy. In the case of Hong Kong, in relation to its financial role as a free port and the symbolic status that its handover in 1997 possessed as the end of the British Empire, its close and concrete connection with Canton seemed to have enjoyed a far less prominent existence — not least the latter’s crucial water supply to Hong Kong, which was a major reason why the whole of Hong Kong, rather than just the New Territories, which was under a 99-year lease, was handed over to China. Thus, one can say that there might also have been transnationalist biases in some sphere of historical inquiry, especially in studies of non-West colonial outposts. And in blindly furthering the transnational connection (linking them back to the West) in such cases, historians, instead of fulfilling transnationalism’s commitment to the multiplicity of scales and perspectives, might just have been perpetuating what Adelman called the use of “Resterners” to explain the West under the guise of global history. In so doing, they effectively reduce such places to footnotes of Western imperialism, thus neglecting the local associations they had. Again, all this is just based on my very partial impressions, but I do believe a degree of self-reflexivity is indispensable to the advance of transnationalism as a historical approach.