A question that was presented in my mind with both the European Review of History as well as Pierre-Yves Saunier’s chapter 6 was deceptively simple: where does history happen? The default answer was obvious for a while, history happened within nations and empires or occasionally in continents. These containers were used to categorize events and arrange narratives, however, both readings challenge this idea by arguing that space is not a neutral backdrop for historical narration. Space is something that is constructed, negotiated, and constantly remade by circumstances such as circulation, connection, and interaction.
“Space” needs to be taken as seriously as other historical categories, which is pushed by the European Review of History. There needs to be a step away from treating borders as fixed lines on a map and instead need to distinguish between “borders” and “frontiers”, and between territory as a legal demarcation and the space as a lived, overlapping zone of constant interaction. Economic networks that linked Germany and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century or migrant communities stretching all across North America, demonstrate how historical spaces often do not coincide with specific/ exact political territories: these spaces are layered, polycentric, and relational. Europe is more a space constituted by transnational lines rather than a self-contained entity, as Kiran Klaus Patel suggests.
Saunier proposes the question to historians not just to rethink what we study but how we study it. Transnational history doesn’t need a grand global synthesis detached from archives but rather one that demands deep empirical work. Through the study of people, objects, and ideas across multiple different sites and the reconstruction of their trajectories from primary sources, these circulations will become visible. Transnational history is a research-intensive effort to identify relations that cut across and through conventional units, not just a collage of national histories.
Conrad warns that spatial units should not be the starting point of research but rather an object of inquiry. The nation is something that is shaped by, and shaping, transnational processes, not just a natural container of history. Dossier argues that even the idea of “territory” itself was constructed through imperial expansion, technological change, and geopolitics in recent centuries. Spatializing transnational history requires one to historicize territory rather than discarding it. Historicizing it by showing how it emerged, hardened, and maybe even fractured through the connections historians are seeking to trace.
The main takeaway for me with these readings was the idea to not replace the nation with the globe but to perhaps recalibrate our lens’ as historians. Transnational history reveals a plethora of operations, like how actors move across multiple scales at once, or how chronologies shift when we follow circulations rather than wars, and how spaces overlooked can turn out to be central nodes in larger networks. History produces space. Especially for recent history, it becomes difficult to return to older, container-based narratives of the past so it is important to keep these ideas at the forefront of our research strategies.