It is essential that transnational historians engage with space and time in a flexible manner since, in transnational exchange, both time and space can have a different quality. For instance, the phenomenon of technological developments like the telegram or railways significantly affected human understandings and experiences of time and space. Even seemingly simple objects such as postcards carry the potential for exchanges which give participants “a sense of participation in a much wider world than everyday life…allowed”. Alcalde opens his article with a criticism of the emphasis on temporal over spatial dimensions in traditional historical narratives. While there have been efforts in historiography to reconsider periodization, regionality has “remained largely unquestioned”, and historians’ “uncritical allegiance” to the boundaries of nation-states, regions and continents as “natural and self-evident frameworks for historical research” requires a review. Despite a rising awareness of spatiality, visible in the ‘spatial turn’ of the social sciences, the spatialization of transnational history largely remains a task to be done.
In recent years, however, historians have begun to adopt alternative interpretations of space. Michael Müller and Cornelius Torp (2009), for instance, gave a definition to ‘transnational space’ which promoted a constructivist understanding of space. Roland Wenzlhuemer, on the other hand, proposes a relativistic concept of space in which transnational spaces exist but interact and overlap with other spatial configurations. In yet another approach, Rodogno, Struck (!), and Vogel endorse the notion of the ‘transnational sphere’ in which networks may also be considered spaces.
The second major move by transnational historians to tackle the epistemological problem of defining transnational space draws on a combination of different scales of spatial analysis, a jeux d’échelles approach. Wenzlhuemer adopts a change in scale of analysis, but historians like Saunier push forward the notion of ‘translocality’, drawing attention to its applicability to situations “that do not involve countries, especially in regions where the national state was a latecomer”. Transnational history shows how configurations of space shape human activity, but as Saunier reminds us, this is also true vice versa. Similarly, Vedran Duancic addresses how physical geographic features can operate as borders “only if historical actors ascribe such function to them”.
Reflecting back on Pierre-Yves Saunier’s introduction, transnational historians must work with and through, above and under the nation as a unit of historical understanding. Moreover, what this week’s readings illuminate is that transnational historians must go further to work with other units of spatial and temporal understanding as well. In his chapter on methodology, Saunier tasks transnational historians with stretching their spatial imagination through intellectual movement and exercise. Although he suggests that ‘nations’ as historical units and pigeonholes “have shaped too much of modern history to be jettisoned”, he claims that by making a lateral move toward studying ‘smaller countries’ and vertical moves above and beneath ‘the nation’ as a historical unit and by adopting what geographers term ‘scalar logic’. This solution testifies that there is no perfect transnational methodology. Balance seems to be the key here.
A transnational historian must find order but account for mobility, must integrate a different conception of spatiality but situate their argument within specific contexts, and must not reify space as a given and self-contained framework. Susan Rau’s call for historians to bring their attention to spatial dynamics, perceptions, uses and practices draws on social sciences to raise the bar for how far transnational historians can push understandings of historical spatial configurations. Sebastian Conrad postulates that “no unity of analysis is inherently superior”; there is no perfect methodology for transnational history, and nothing should be treated as a given, but (I think!) this keeps it exciting.