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This week’s readings highlighted important potential limitations and advantages of transnational and global history, beyond defining these terms. Nancy Green brings our attention to the nuances underlying migration studies, employing case studies of specific individuals to showcase the occasionally negative

The late 19th, and early 20th century was a period of dynamic change in Europe, and the world. New developments came, like the existence of the nation state, increased trade in consumer goods, mobility, migration, globalisation, and nationalism. This all

Conrad’s Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany and Ureña Valerio’s Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities share a common argument, that the German nation was created through the entanglements its constituent populations had with global labour, colonialism, and transnational mobility, rather

This week’s reading made me rethink what global history looks like in practice. Instead of just being about connections between different parts of the world, it seemed to be more about how power, knowledge and identity are produced through those

Conrad’s three chapters for this week shed light onto a fascinating concept that I personally had never considered. As someone typically only exposed to more mainstream historiographical methodologies, it had never occurred to me that the cultural character of a

Readings this week illustrate the benefits of adopting a transnational lens to scrutinise national pasts. One could argue that approaching history by dividing it into compartmentalised nations can lead to two crucial omissions: first, that of the exogenous formation and

Growing up competing in geography bees, the boundaries of nations are practically embedded into my brain. Pierre-Yves Saunier, in his book Transnational History: Theory and History, prompts a reevaluation of the sheer durability and the supremacy of nations as ‘units’ of historical analysis and encourages historians to adjust their perspective. In his introduction, Saunier explains

While my understanding of the applications and benefits of transnational history has been expanded by the readings this week. I primarily found myself thinking back to previous historical work I’ve encountered and its place in this debate.  I found the

As I read through this article and chapter, I became simultaneously clear yet more confused about what transnational history is; and maybe that’s a good thing, or not. The debates concerning transnational history seem to encourage a flexibility of methodologies

Turning towards transnational and global history emerged from dissatisfaction with the nation-state as a primary unit of explanation for historical events. The readings from the first and second weeks all push the idea that national frameworks obscure the processes that

This week’s readings provided extensive depth into not only how to come to terms with and define (to an extent) transnational history and similar historical approaches, but also how they came about and under what contexts and reception. The AHR

I was intrigued by the discussion of the similarities and differences between transnational history and other approaches that emphasize an outlook beyond the nation-state, which both the AHR conversation article and Saunier’s introductory chapter discuss. Admittedly, I often struggle to

Both Saunier and Christopher et al. agree in broad strokes that ‘transnational history’ is an as-yet unfixed and somewhat fluid methodology, and is better described as a point of view, or method of relational history, that can then be applied to almost any historical