This week’s readings on migration highlight how the field has been reshaped by broader historiographical shifts towards transnational and global history. Circling back to our first weeks and Clavin’s argument, she says that transnational history is less a fixed methodology than an approach that foregrounds connections and transfers across boundaries and opens up new ways of thinking about historical processes. Migration history, perhaps more than any other field, demonstrates the value of this perspective, as it inherently challenges the assumption that societies can be understood within the confines of nation-states. Similarly, Suanier emphasises that histroians must move beyond methodological nationalism by focusing on relations between, across and through societies. Migration provides a clear example of why this shift is necessary. Traditional approaches often treated migration as a linear movement from one national context to another, focusing on immigration policies or patterns of settlement within a single country. However, the readings for this week instead conceptualise migration as a multidirectional and ongoing process embedded in glocal systems of labour and state formation.
Wimme and Glick Schiller’s critique of methodological nationalism is particularly useful in this regard. They argue that migration studies have too often reproduced national frameworks by taking the nation-state as a given unit of analysis. Contrastingly, they propose a transnational approach that examines the networks, practices, identities, and movement that extend across borders. Their perspective is reflected in Reinecke’s analysis of migration in modern Europe, which situates mobility within broader processes of state-building and global economic change. Migration is thus shaped by transnational labour markets and political structures that link different regions.
Van de Laar’s focus on cities further reinforces the shift away from the nation as the primary unit of analysis. By examining urban spaces as places of global migration, he highlights how local experiences are embedded in wider transnational networks. Similarly, Casmiscioli’s work demonstrates how migration was central to the construction of national identities, particularly through discourses of race and gender. These readings show that migration actively reshapes national boundaries.
The AHR ‘conversation on Transnational History’ reinforces this point by noting that transnational approaches encourage historians to examine both the origins and destinations of migration, as well as the movements in between. This more relational perspective allows for a deeper understanding of how migration connects different societies and challenges fixed notions of belonging.
This week’s readings demonstrate that migration history is a key site for the development of transnational approaches. By foreground movement and exchange, migration studies reveal the limitations of nation-centred frameworks and offer a more dynamic understanding of historical change. In this sense, migration history exemplifies the broader historiographical shift identified by Clavin and Saunier, showing how historians can move beyond the nation-state to better capture the complexities of the modern world.