MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

From the early colonisers and traders going out into the world, to leading intellectuals of the Enlightenment, we can recognise many Scots as significant examples of Transnational and Global actors. So, should we really be surprised by the involvement of Scots in the Esperanto movement, right from the movement’s origins? Perhaps not. In 1911, 100 Scots travelled to Antwerp in order to attend the 7^th World Esperanto Congress. This is where this study shall take its starting point.

The Antwerp Congress 1911 was the largest World Esperanto Congress to have been held since the first in 1905, with a recorded 1,800 attendees. Esperanto itself, is a constructed language, intended to bring together people and nations, creating a transnational network through language and the communication of likeminded individuals and groups. In creating this network, a route for communication and connectiveness, it provides a clear example of a Transnational environment and interaction, through which we can investigate the interaction and experience of Scottish individuals within the Esperanto movement.

Using the register of attendees – where the 100 Scottish attendants are recorded – we can begin to pose questions to drive and direct further study into the level and character of Scottish interaction with the Esperanto movement. To do this there will be an initial analysis of the data using comparative methods. By systematically comparing this data with other sets it will become clear as to the extent of the abnormality, or normality, of this level of Scottish participation in the Esperanto movement. Comparison is a good analytical method to be applied and viewed through a transnational lens as it can show relationship Scotland had with the movement and other nations. Firstly, we can compare the number of Scottish attendants with the number of attendants from countries of a similar population. Initial observation indicates suggests a higher involvement from Scots than comparable nations such as Denmark.[1] From here there will be further comparison made between Scottish attendance numbers at the 1911 Congress and at former and subsequent Congresses in the pre-war period. These comparisons will indicate the consistency and character of Scottish participation within the Esperanto movement.

In doing this we will be able to see whether there were any significant increases or decreases in Scottish attendance and when. If we see an increase in Scottish attendance at this congress, whether sudden or gradual, we can begin to pose other questions that can gradually become increasingly detailed in aim and scope. If we see an increase the next driving question becomes why? More specifically, why Antwerp? – Was it easier to travel to; was this a response to a growing movement in Scotland or the work and influence of key individuals; was there an underlying social sentiment among the Scottish that they want more international interaction, possibly distinguished from the influence of England?

At this point, initial ideas indicate that there was an increase in the participation of Scots in the Esperanto movement at home, and so increased participation in the Congress makes sense. If this is the case, then the next step would be to question, once again, why? Was this increase the work of clubs and Esperanto organisations, or that of key individuals? Furthermore, increased participation begs the question of who within Scottish society this may include – was there a specific profession, or a preference of gender within the Scottish Esperanto movement. The register indicates the professions of many of the participants. Also, a collection of Scottish Esperantist, John Beveridge, are available. Analysis of these should point to some of the answers to these driving questions

Once some of the specifics of what made up the Scottish Esperanto movement are established, it may be prudent to question why Scottish attendance was so high when compared with other countries of similar population size. In doing this we should be able to identify some of the ways in which social and intellectual cultures in Scotland and other European countries converge, diverge and interact. Mostly, it should point to key factors that influenced Scottish involvement with the Esperanto movement.

[1] Scottish population 1911 – 4,761,000*; Scottish attendance – 100

   Danish population 1911 – 2,747,000*; Danish attendance – 9

   Austrian population – 6,669,000*; Austrian attendance – 37

  *rounded to the nearest thousand. r

In his posthumously-published work, Datong Shu, or The Book of Great Unity, Qing intellectual and statesman Kang Youwei (1858-1927) outlines a utopian image of a united “One World,” or “Great Unity.” In Kang’s utopian society, the “nine boundaries” of human suffering have been abolished: the very concepts of nation (national borders), class, race, sex, family (and its relationships), occupation (private ownership), disorder (unjust law), kind (the separation of humans from animals), and suffering itself (as it provokes further suffering). The One World imagined in Datong Shu is one that prioritizes “rightness,” which is defined loosely as what brings people happiness. It is characterized by the fulfilling, harmonious lives led by its inhabitants, citizens of a united world whose only borders are its arbitrary administrative units.[1]

What is most striking about Datong Shu is the ideological contrast that exists between the ideas Kang presents in his work and the historical context of his times. The world Kang lived in was one dominated and divided by Western imperial domination, yet a work predicting the creation of a harmonious Great Unity was still written in it. The very fact that a text as radically-minded as Datong Shu was written within the context of its times provokes pressing historical questions, questions that are best answered via the methods and perspective of global intellectual history.

In their 2013 work on Global Intellectual History, Moyn and Sartori propose a number of paths that may be adopted by the global intellectual historian. One takes its starting point by defining the “global” as a “subjective category used by historical agents.”[2] In other words, the approach considers how historical actors themselves perceived the concept of the global. This is the historiographical angle that I will take in considering Datong Shu, as I will analyze how Kang conceives of the “global” within his text.

My proposed project seeks to question the ideological disparities between the imagined world of Datong Shu and the historical context in which it was written in order to better understand Kang’s times. What is the vision of the “global” that Kang articulates in his work? What underpins his ideas toward the idea of a world government, a fully-realized “Great Unity?” What does this tell us about the historical nature of 19^th and 20^th century China, let alone the world? These are the kinds of historiographical questions my proposed project will ask of Datong Shu and its place within history.

My global intellectual approach will be centered around a close reading of Datong Shu. My project will utilize a 1958 translation of the work by Laurence G. Thompson, as I am unable to read the Classical Chinese of the original.[3] I will disclaim this clearly within my work. However, I believe that the inevitable distortions of Datong Shu’s translation will have little impact upon my overall project; I will focus upon Datong Shu’s concepts within a broad historical context, rather than consider the text’s precise definitions and wording.

My close reading of Datong Shu will be informed by a global intellectual history framework that will place it in conversation with other texts and within the context of its times. Much has already been written on Kang as a historical figure and Datong Shu as an intellectual text, but there has yet to be a work that considers Kang’s conception of the global within Datong Shu.[4] Through completing this project, in addition to remedying this historiographical gap, I hope to foster better understandings of Kang’s times and historical conceptions of the global.

[1] K’ang Yu-Wei and Laurence G. Thompson, trans., Ta T’ung Shu (New York, 1958).

[2] Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History” in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History, (New York, 2013) pp. 4, 16-17.

[3] K’ang, Ta T’ung Shu.

[4] See Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution (New York, 1981) and Ban Wang, “The Moral Vision in Kang Youwei’s Book of the Great Community” in Ban Wang, ed., Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham, 2017), pp. 87-105.

Probably one of my greatest struggles is decision making. I hate having to choose what to have for dinner, what movie to go see, what modules to take and, mostly, what topic I should choose for projects and essays. It just seems like a big decision. Make the wrong choice and you end up having to write 4,000 words and spend who knows how many hours, reading, researching and writing about something you aren’t actually interested in, or feel is unimportant or insignificant. At the same time, make the safe choice, choosing a general topic area previously studied, because maybe knowing some background which will help and make it easier, is rarely truly interesting, inspiring or rewarding. Personally, I often fall back on British Imperial History. It’s something I have previously studies through school and sub-honours and feels safe, but, while there is a place for further study there, I’m not sure its mine. So again, we return to the question – what topic?

            Maybe something with that can teach us about our society? Maybe we should choose our questions based on what is happening in our world now and why that is happening? Maybe something that can teach us lessons that we can apply now? Something to do with global connections and communications? Maybe associated with political and cultural division? Why are we divided? Why are so many peoples oppressed or excluded from society? Is there an ideal societal make up? Are we getting closer to it? Or further away? What can history, historical events and phenomena, show or teach us about the human condition? As far as I can tell we are all as messed up as each other. No, maybe the big questions are not quite the starting place I need.

            So maybe something with a personal connection? But I must be honest, there’s not a lot I feel a personal connection with that I am yet that interested in studying. So there goes that option.

            What I am interested in is connections. Connections, networks and infrastructures. There’s a running joke among my friends that I am going to write my dissertation on trains. While I’m not sure this will happen in its entirety, I will try work a reference to my first network love in there somewhere. Ok, anecdote over – trains did spark in me an interest in networks and connections and the influences of these on how societies have grown and events that have taken place. So here is a starting point perhaps? But I still feel no closer to a topic or question for study specifically.

            So, what now? Well, now I’m going to ask someone’s advice. No point going around in circles. After meeting with Bernhard, I have now been reading and looking at the Esperanto movement, especially the Scottish connections and participations. While I admit I was a little sceptical at first, I was told that sometimes you just have to go for it – and now I’m glad I did. This is something I had honestly barely heard of before, but now I realise this movement brings some many different cultures, regions and people together. It provides an extensive network, examples of connections, and a need and examples of the use of infrastructures (so I can look at trains, even if I don’t directly mention them…).

            The point is, after all that faffing with what topic to choose I was never going to get anywhere until someone told me to go for it and run with it. To just take the leap. Sometimes we become so preoccupied with finding the big or important question, or simply completing the task, that we miss the opportunity to immerse ourselves and really enjoy history. I’m not sure yet where this project will take me, but I can already see so many options, and whether I answer the big questions or complete the task, I’m sure I will find something interesting and enjoyable along the way. In addition, I’ve realised the importance of taking the leap: next step – do it without being pushed! So, now it’s your turn – Take the Leap. and reall

‘Migration’, the movement of people across borders, is not alien to historical research. Recently, historians have examined the way migration has influenced identity in ‘diasporas’: migrants from the same origin that have settled in a new place. This research has opened up inquiries into the complex identifications that diasporic communities have with ‘citizenship’ and ‘belonging’.[1] They are people with ‘feet in two societies’: simultaneously attached to their new nation and birthplace.[2]

I am particularly interested in this identity question vis-à-vis Chinese-Cuban diasporas. Coinciding with the rise of Subaltern Studies, the histories of previously neglected spaces and groups of people, previous work on the Chinese-Cubans has focused on them in the nineteenth century, especially during the Cuban Wars for Independence (1894-98).[3] Few of these works have focused on Chinese-Cubans in the twentieth century – or if they have, the twentieth century is written alongside the nineteenth century as part of a broad overview of how Chinese-Cubans have never conformed to political and legal definitions of national identity and citizenship.[4] Moreover, these works are written about using traditional historical methodologies. Only a few authors, like Kathleen López, are incorporating new methodologies, like transnational history, into their research. There is, therefore, a need to write a twentieth century history of the Chinese-Cubans through the use of new methodologies, like transnational history.

To fill in this gap, I will use global microhistory to conduct a survey of the Chinese-Cubans during two periods of upheaval: the Chinese Civil War (1945-49) and the Cuban Communist Revolution (1953-58).[5] During these periods, I will examine how ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Cubanness’/’cubanidad‘ manifested in the writings of three notable Chinese-Cubans: Antonio Chuffat-Latour, and Pedro Eng Herrera and Mauro García Triana. Chuffat-Latour was a supporter of Sun Yat-Sen’s Kuomintang Party.[6] Eng Herrera and García Triana played a large role usurping Fulgencio Batista and bringing Fidel Castro into power.[7]

Tentatively, I argue that our current understanding of identity-formation is too simplistic. In comparing identity in these two periods of upheaval, it seems that in both, the shared experiences of colonialism and revolution in both China and Cuba were what allowed Chinese-Cubans to feel like – and become regarded as – members of the Cuban nation and nation-building project. To show this, I utilise Chinese and Cuban epistemologies in my analysis, examining how bodies are imagined and used in both. From this, I hope to show that claiming Chineseness allowed Chinese-Cubans to access experiences and understandings of colonialism and revolution. This access gave them power to speak about these topics as they manifested within Cuba. In turn, this power is what allowed the three men to acquire cubanidad and become key members of the Cuban nation-building projects in their respective contexts. Overall, this reveals a paradox – people can be acknowledged as outsiders and yet still be considered integral to their new home’s nation-building project.

[1] Wendy Kozol, ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’ in American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 5 (December 2006), p. 1445

[2] Elsa Chaney, ‘The World Economy and Contemporary Migration’ in International Migration Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1979), p. 209

[3] See Robert Evan Ellis, China in Latin America: the Whats and Wherefores; Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced; Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba; L. Eve Armentrout Ma, Revolutionaries, Monarchists, and Chinatowns: Chinese politics in the Americas and the 1911 Revolution; Lok Siu, ‘Chino Latino Restaurants: Converging Communities, Identities, and Cultures’ in Afro-Hispanic Review 27:1; Mauro García Triana, Pedro Eng Herrera, Gregor Benton (tr.), The Chinese in Cuba, 1847-Now; Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History; Gregor Benton, Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917-1945

[4] López, Chinese Cubans, p. 5

[5] See Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’ in Journal of World History; Martha Hodes, ‘A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife’ in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present 21:4, Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, Jacques Revel, ‘Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History’ in The International History Review 33:4

[6] Antonio Chuffat-Latour, Apunte Histórico de los Chinos en Cuba

[7] Mauro García Triana, Pedro Eng Herrera, Gregor Benton (tr.), The Chinese in Cuba: 1847-now.

The last of the Mitford Sisters died in 2014. Deborah Cavendish, known to the world as Debo the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was a well liked English eccentric of the sort the aristocracy can be relied on to produce. She famously decided at a young age that she would marry a Duke, and sang to herself a version of “The Man I’d Like to Marry”, with the word “Man” replaced with “Duke”. However, all her eccentricities were not what set her apart from the rest of her sisters. The reason for that is her dogged refusal to leave England, or even Devonshire. Not so the other Mitfords, whose transnational lives are a worthy subject of conversation, as examples of the many and varied paths of the lower rungs of the aristocracy in the 20^th century.

First to be discussed should be the Mitford who did the most to establish and maintain the families name in the public eye. Nancy Mitford was a novelist and socialite most famous for two semi-autobiographical works, The Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate. These novels were heavily based on her life and the lives of her sisters, with Jessica Mitford being one of the models for the protagonist of The Pursuit of Love, for instance. Nancy is an example of the transnational socialite class. One of the “Bright Young People” of inter-war Europe, she was a frequent international traveller. Eventually falling in love with a former Free French resistance fighter (while married to another man) she settled down in Paris as so many writers of the time did. She is in this way a model of the transnational bohemian.

Next, Jessica Mitford should not go without discussion. Like Nancy she had left wing politics, however Jessica’s were far more extreme. Along with her husband, Jessica went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War, alongside many from the worldwide communist movement. It is hard to think of a more transnational armed body than the International Brigades. After the end of the civil war Jessica returned to England, where she engaged in the battle with the Blackshirts, before travelling to America. There, like many communists, she became highly involved in the struggle for civil rights, which led to her being called in front of HUAC. However she like many others left the communist party in ’58, after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. It is also in America where Jessica wrote her most well-known book, The American Way of Death, an expose on the abuses of the funeral industry.

Finally, we come to the most sordid of the Mitfords, Unity and Diana, the fascists. Diana married Sir Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, in 1936. The wedding took place in the house of Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Propaganda Minister. For her involvement with international fascism she was interned for three years during World War Two, along with her husband. She remained with him for his entire life and was an unrepentant fascist to the end. This did not stop her being a member of high society, or from contributing to several high-profile papers including the Independent. However, her fascism, while a part of the international current, was a largely English phenomenon. It is her sister, Unity, who truly embodied the transnational nature of inter-war fascism. A convert to the cause, just like her sister, Unity travelled to Germany in 1934 due to her obsession with Adolf Hitler. Her familial connections with Hitler’s beloved Wagner granted her access to his inner circle of friends. When Hitler announced the Anschluss with Austria, it was Unity who stood next to him on the balcony. She was a passionate supporter of an Anglo-German alliance against Judaism, and frequently pleaded with Hitler to this effect. When Britain declared war on Germany, she was so distraught that she shot herself in the head in the English Garden in Munich. While she lived for several years after, she never recovered mentally, and died in 1948.

It is clear that these four women, the bohemian, the communist, and the fascists, represent different strands of development for the lower-ranks of the aristocracy following the first world war. With the old world dying, they had to find places in the new one. Clearly this turned out better for some than for others, but it is clear that all four embarked on clearly transnational paths.

The text I have chosen to base my upcoming project proposal on is perhaps the most bizarre, ambitious work I have ever come across in my two and a half years of studying history at the university level. Its title: Datong Shu, or, The Book of Great Unity. It was published posthumously in 1935, seven years following the death of its author, the Chinese intellectual and statesman Kang Youwei (1858-1927). Historically, he is most well-known for his intellectual works and his leadership of the Qing Dynasty’s Hundred Days’ Reform (1898), which sought to modernize China along national, cultural, political, and educational lines. The movement ultimately failed, as it was quashed by reactionary elements in the Qing court.

Reportedly, Kang refused to publish Datong Shu despite urgings to do so on the basis that its ideas were too ahead of its times. Upon reading parts of Laurence G. Thompson’s translation of the work, it’s easy to see why. The book imagines and predicts a future in which the world is unified into a “One World,” a utopian “Great Unity” in which all of the sources of humankind’s sufferings are rendered obsolete. As put by Kang, “The Way of One World is [the attainment of] utmost peace-and-equality, utmost justice, utmost jen [a term that loosely translates to “goodness”], and the most perfect government. Even though there be [other] Ways, none can add to this.”[1]

What, according to Kang, must be abolished in order to achieve the One World? The “nine boundaries” that represent “the sources of all suffering.”[2] According to Kang, these boundaries cause humans to suffer due to the obligations that they place on them. They are nation (national borders), class, race, sex, family (and its relationships), occupation (private ownership), disorder (unjust law), kind (the separation of humans from animals), and suffering itself (as it provokes further suffering). Essentially, Kang’s Datong Shu imagines a global utopia that links all of humanity.

The entirety of Datong Shu is based upon the idea that what constitutes “right” and “wrong” is dependent on if and how they contribute to human happiness. Kang maintains this idea throughout Datong Shu, and this results in truly radical, utopian ideas that would be considered as such even in our day and age. For instance, he proposes the destruction of the family unit, given how it obligates its members to defer to and support one another. He reimagines marriage as a series of one-year contracts of alliance that may be signed between two people. Men and women are not to be differentiated from each other, and all of humanity is to eventually coalesce into one great global race.

The fact that such sentiments were espoused by a 19^th and 20^th century Chinese scholar are even more confounding. While the Datong Shu is based upon radical interpretations of classical Chinese thought (and perhaps slight Western intellectual influences), Kang espouses a global, universal vision of the world throughout. Miraculously, he speaks of a Great Unity and a One World in a time when European powers dominate the Earth and subjugate its vast subaltern populations. While it is arguable that Kang imagines a Chinese-inspired global vision in Datong Shu, he ultimately thinks in terms of the global. He thinks transnationally as well; key aspects of his description of a One World government involve dividing up the Earth into equal geographic sections for administrative purposes and the global abolishment of political borders, complete with all of their restrictions.

I’ve yet to properly imagine the historical questions I need to ask of this work, let alone an answer to the ever-pervasive “so what” question Konrad Lawson drove into my head last semester: “why does this matter?” However, in Datong Shu I see that there is quite a lot to be analyzed, especially through the practice of global intellectual history. In their important 2013 work on Global Intellectual History, Moyn and Sartori propose a number of paths that may be adopted by the global intellectual historian. One takes its starting point by defining the “global” as a “subjective category used by historical agents.”[3] In other words, the approach considers how historical actors themselves perceived the idea of the global.

Perhaps my research will go down this path. Wish me luck.

[1] K’ang Yu-Wei and Laurence G. Thompson, trans., Ta T’ung Shu (New York, 1958), p. 72.

[2] Ibid., p. 74.

[3] Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, “Approaches to Global Intellectual History” in Moyn and Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History, pp. 4, 16-17.

I have struggled to find a topic to focus on for my historiographical essay. I have wrestled with terms of identity, hybridity and struggled to pinpoint definitions this week. Identity, I have been told, is a hard to think to write about and research because it is such a difficult concept to nail down and quantify. It cannot be measured because everyone’s is unique and different. People identify as nationalities, genders/sexes, they see themselves as belonging to races and yet no two people’s combinations will be exactly the same. As Bernhard rightly pointed out to me, this makes it difficult to research. However, this seems to only fuel my fascination.

I read an article this week called Negotiating Hybridity: transnational reconstruction of migrant subjectivity in Koreatown, Los Angeles. It focuses on the physical space that Koreatown occupies as well as what it has come to represent both within its communities and those outside of it. The community within LA’s Koreatown is one of the largest outside Korea, and the authors argue that it should be seen as a hybrid space rather than one that is strictly homogenous as Koreans abroad. This article caught my eye because I grew up close to San Francisco, which hosts the ‘largest Chinese enclave outside Asia’. This grouping of Asian identities into almost ghettos (for lack of a better word, meant in terms of a minority group) is echoed in many other cities and countless other minorities in all parts of the world. The article gave great insight to why ethnic identities intensify when people migrate elsewhere. As they are seen as different, they forced to cling to what these are. Ethnic identity is not a natural phenomenon. It is a social identity, that is created deep within the psyche of self and other. To identify yourself is to see yourself in comparison to other people. My parents have recently moved to Mannheim, where they see the same thing with Vietnamese and Persian communities. No one place is ethnically/culturally homogenous anymore, which is something inherently positive. We all love greater food options, exposure to other cultures.

I really enjoyed reading Lee and Park’s personal take on transnationalism. Both Korean, this article was written while Lee was a visiting scholar in Ohio. Their interest emphasized that transnationalism is bounded to local places, and the opportunities and constraints of the people that occupy them. They quote Bhabha in that ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity’, and from this that Koreatown is not aptly named. Chinatown in San Francisco falls victim to this as well. It is not internally homogenous, but rather is home to multiple Asian and minority identities, and does not even encompass the same ones that it did half a century ago. They call this an ‘imagined geography’, which harks back to sub-honours IR and history constantly throwing Anderson’s Imagined Communities on the reading lists. Identity here is forced upon a physical geography and space, but the identity is constantly adapting, as are the parameters of ‘Korean-ness’.

Maybe it’s because I struggle with my own identity, proving Bernhard’s point that it is hard to define. Perhaps identity cannot be quantified, but that does not mean there isn’t  scholarship attempting to draw some links between the spaces, our backgrounds and the way in which we interact.

“Mechanically I laid myself back in the sledge and let my horse run for safety. The wolf did not mind me in the least, but took a leap over me, and falling furiously on the horse, began to devour the hind-part of the poor animal, which ran the faster for his pain and terror. Thus unnoticed and safe myself, I lifted my head slyly up, and with horror I beheld that the wolf had ate his way into the horse’s body; it was not long before he had fairly forced himself into it, when I took my advantage, and fell upon him with the butt-end of my whip. This unexpected attack in his rear frightened him so much, that he leapt forward with all his might: the horse’s carcass dropped on the ground, but in his place the wolf was in the harness, and I on my part whipping him continually: we both arrived in full career safe to St. Petersburg, contrary to our respective expectations, and very much to the astonishment of the spectators.“

This extract from the Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, published in 1785, made me laugh because of its sheer preposterousness. The phenomena it contributed to however, namely the literary invention of a wild and retrogressive Eastern Europe in need of taming by the West, was a very serious one.

First thing to note: a wolf is a beast. The wolf represents Eastern Europe. Baron Munchausen’s choice to present a wild animal as characteristic of the East instead of a human being is significant. It implies that the territory he is exploring is an uncivilised, dangerous wilderness. The wolf is ferocious, but is eventually made to seem ridiculous by the sly baron, who uses his superior intelligence to trick the wolf into the harness. Read symbolically, the West has tamed the East by the end of the story, and even exploited its resources. The East has been put to the service of the West.

Second thing to notice: the explicitly sexualised imagery. ‘Hind-part’, ‘butt-end’, ‘forced himself in’; the crude analogy with anal rape is perhaps partly an attempt by the author to appeal to the low-humour of his readership. On the other hand, it is also an allusion to a violent, intimate form of domination. Eastern Europe is the victim, humiliated by the dominant West. It reflects both the deep-rooted inter-penetration between the East and the West (a transnationalism apparent in the sheer quantity of travel literature), and the power hierarchies that came with it. Echoing the thesis of Said’s Orientalism, Eastern Europe was imagined as representative of everything the West was not. The two were complementary and opposing.

Third thing to consider: the fantastical element. This extract is clearly fictional, the figment of an overcharged imagination. But it was swallowed up, regardless, by countless readers, shaping and colouring their mental maps of Eastern Europe in the process. Readers often don’t care if what they are reading is rooted in factual reality, and authors exploit this. Voltaire wrote extensively about Russia without ever having visited. Rousseau spoke on behalf of Poland, despite never having ventured further East than Switzerland. These two hugely influential Enlightenment authors exemplify the lack of concern about travel literature diverging from reality. It is why I use the words ‘invented’ and ‘imagined’. The West took control of the East through symbolic language.

These past few weeks, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topics for my historiography essay. The one ‘common denominator” that have always had when looking at topics for my m writing has been that I have wanted to do a transnational history which is related to women and gender. Last semester I took the module “Men and Women 1500-1800”, a module which focuses primarily on the daily lives of women in Early Modern history, and themes such as marriage, women in work and sexuality. What I learned through the models is that in order to study Gender history, especially in the early modern period historians have to take an approach which focuses on what most would call ‘the private sphere’. This is partially due  the age old framework that the private is feminine and the public is masculine, as most sources available on women are related to the ‘private sphere’ as women were excluded (at least ordinary women were) from publicly exercising power outside of the domains of the home. 

The sources that we looked at ranged from marriage contracts, to private letters, to shopping lists, and court documents. All sources which for most of the time looked at the individual, private lives of women. When reflecting on this, I saw an immediate connection with micro-history. When approaching gender studies, especially in the early modern period historians have to attempt to look at individual stories for most of the time. If women were confined to a private sphere, then it is the private lives of women which will give us a more detailed and accurate picture of women at that period, whilst also showcase their exclusion from the ‘public sphere’. Natalie Zemon Davis is well known for using micro-history as a tool to for studying gender history, most notably in her book ‘Women on the Margins’. 

If women are mostly absent from documents relating to economics and property, travel, and even literature and intellectual history during the Early Modern period, it is perhaps through a microhistory, which speaks of ordinary women’s lives, that we will truly be able to paint a picture which reflects the complexity of women’s lives. This could also be relevant to exploring women of upper classes which (outside of immigrant or slave women) had the greatest chance at leading ‘transnational lives’.  As Isabelle said in one of her blogposts, Microhistory isn’t actually little, and the exploration of women’s live through a micro-historical lenses could help us position women in a ‘transnational’ or ‘public sphere’, which they rarely appear on in the Early Modern period. 

It is February 27, 2007, and the climax of the 79th Academy Awards is approaching. On the stage, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson open the envelope containing which of the nominated films has been judged best picture. The winner, they announce, is The Departed, a gritty mob drama set in the heart of darkest Boston. Considering that the films director, has already been awarded Best Director, this is perhaps unsurprising. With this victory Scorsese takes home two Academy Awards, his first and to date only in a lifetime of playing the bridesmaids to other nominees. However, while this may be where the story ends, it is far from where it begins.

The Departed, like many of Scorsese’s other works, was an adaptation. However unlike films like I Hear You Paint Houses, The Last Temptation of Christ, or Goodfellas, Scorsese was adapting another movie rather than a book. Or rather, he was adapting a trilogy of movies, the Infernal Affairs series. This was a Hong Kong set series of crime thrillers dealing with dirty cops and undercover agents, all hunting each other. Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, the films cleaned up on the international awards circuit, but had little impact on America. This was left to Scorsese’s adaptation. Scorsese’s film also had significantly greater commercial success, making more in one film than Lau and Mak made in three. For a long time, this would have been accepted as almost natural. Of course an East Asian film would meet with little critical or commercial success in America, and could only hope to get close to that through adaptation. However now, as Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite wins big at the Oscars and even achieves moderate commercial success in America, it is worth returning to and re-examining this transnational relationship between East Asian cinema and American adaptors, and how exploitative it can be.

An irony of the transnational situation Infernal Affairs finds itself in is that it is itself a transnational series. The span of the series covers Hong Kong as both Crown Colony and as a relatively autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China. Both situations are very distinct from the traditional transnational context. In fact Infernal Affairs 2 is set over the period of transition between British and Chinese rule, highlighting the chaotic situation and the way different people and groups saw different opportunities in this liminal situation. That a movie about colonialism ended up in a sense colonised is bleakly amusing. And this is not an isolated occurrence. Western remakes of Asian films are very common, from Oldboy to Dragonball to even a mooted Parasite remake. That these movies are often less well regarded than the Asian originals is also an issue. Lau has said that he prefers his movies over The Departed, and critics have generally agreed that it is one of Scorsese’s lesser works. And the less said about the Hollywood Dragonball remake the better. It is easy to see these as a form of colonial exploitation, albeit one far less damaging than resource extraction.

However, it is a mistake to see the relationship between Scorsese and non-American cinema in an entirely exploitative context. Scorsese’s canon includes far more reflective films actually set in and starring Asians, such as Silence and Kundun. Beyond that, he has been an important advocate for the preservation and mainstreaming of Asian cinema in the US. In fact Bong Joon Ho thanked him for such during his Oscars acceptance speech, having beaten him for the award. This is not to provide apologia for the flaws of The Departed. It is to point out how multi-layered the relationship of members of the culture industry in so-called “core” countries is to those that exist on the periphery culturally and economically.

I spent this past weekend down over in Blackpool at the 68^th Annual Inter-Varsity Dance Competition, the biggest ballroom dance competition St Andrews’ Ballroom and Latin Dance Society [BALLADS] attends every year. It is only now, sitting comfortably in bed, still exhausted from the trials of competition, that I find myself thinking about the transnationalism of ballroom dancing and dancesport.

For those unfamiliar with the term “dancesport,” it refers to competitive ballroom dancing, a sport in which couples perform for an audience and panel of judges in successive elimination rounds. The dances performed are more or less what you’d see on Strictly Come Dancing in the UK or Dancing with the Stars in the US, divided up into Standard (Waltz, Quickstep, Tango, Viennese Waltz, and Foxtrot) and Latin (Cha-Cha, Jive, Samba, Rumba, Paso Doble) categories.

Ballroom dancing, at its very core, is transnational, as the dances it encompasses take on influences from all over the world. The Tango, for instance, has its roots in Argentina, and was shaped by European influences into the form it is danced in competitively today. Quickstep developed out of various American styles of dancing, a physical interpretation of the music of the 1920s. The Viennese Waltz’s origins are disputed in spite of its name; it may very well have evolved in modern-day Germany or France. Of course, I’m only addressing Standard dances here; Latin dances (such as Cha-Cha) take on influences from all over the Afro-Caribbean world! These dances, with all of their diverse influences, are practiced and enjoyed around the globe.

Modern dancesport itself is an inherently transnational experience, as the sport’s top professionals and amateurs travel all around the world to compete. The world of dancesport is one that transcends borders. It is largely governed by the World DanceSport Federation [WSDF], headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its most important competition by far is the Blackpool Dance Festival, hosted in its namesake city in England.

A mere glance at the WSDF’s website’s home page reveals dancesport’s transnational nature. Currently, it advertises competitions in Lisbon, Portugal, Brno, Czechia, and Fort Lauderdale, United States. Results for events held in Voesendorf, Austria, Prato, Italy, and Krasnogorsk, Russia are now posted. A video is included documenting the top Standard couples at the WSDF’s Grand Slam competition in Shanghai.  

In this day and age, competitive ballroom dancers live transnational lives by necessity, given the importance of attending events hosted across the world. One of my favorite professional couples is made up of dancers Winson Tam and Anastasia Novikova. The former is of Chinese-Canadian descent, and the latter’s family is from Belarus. They vlog of their travels and international exploits on a rather wholesome YouTube channel I follow from time to time. Its contents very much reflect ballroom dancing’s transnationality; through watching their videos you can follow Winson and Anastasia’s ballroom journey from Chengdu to Tokyo, from Bucharest to Moscow.

Interestingly enough, given St Andrews’ transnational makeup, our very own BALLADS competition team is highly diverse, characterized by its members’ diverse origins. The nationalities of the team we brought to Blackpool this weekend were as follows: English, Scottish, American, German, Austrian, Slovenian, Cypriot, Czech, Indian. I do not mean to simplify my lovely teammates down to nationalities, but seek to highlight how such a team makeup really shows that we live today in a highly interconnected world.

A common theme expressed in our seminars is the idea that transnational history is practiced as a means of making sense of our contemporary, globalized world. I can’t even conceive of how histories of the future may write about our time, a global era in which a subject as specialized as ballroom dancing encompasses so many transnational connections.   

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

These timeless words from Emma Lazarus’ The New Colossus are etched into both my passport and the base of New York City’s Statue of Liberty. The monument was constructed in 1885 following America’s then largest period of immigration. Until this time, immigration in the U.S. was dealt with at the state level, meaning that while there were some states which may have placed restrictions on those traveling from certain countries or from certain ethnic backgrounds (i.e. Chinese Exclusion Act in California), there were other ports of entry open to almost anyone. Still, most of these immigrants came from the more industrial Northern and Western Europe meaning that they not only carried some wealth, but also that physically they looked similar to the existing American populous and had a common protestant faith. Even the poor and Catholic Irish immigrants who came in the millions following the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s were allowed into the country with few restrictions due to their familiar language and ethnicity.

Following a global depression in the late 1880s, however, immigration in America changed dramatically. Not only did these ‘new immigrants’ come in numbers nearly three times as high as the decade before, but they hailed primarily from Southern and Eastern European countries, meaning as well as being Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish, they also both looked and sounded very different from previous immigrant groups. Understandably, this new wave of immigration must have been quite a shock to the rather homogenous east coast American cities where they landed. So, perhaps to no surprise it was in 1890, only five years after the Statue of Liberty was erected to beckon immigrants, that the U.S. federal government seized control of immigration and began to place universal restrictions and quotas on certain groups deemed undesirable or ‘alien’. And, somewhat ironically, the government decided to make the country’s main port of entry the tiny ‘Ellis Island’ which sits in Manhattan Harbor quite literally in the shadow of the colossal Statue of Liberty.

From that point on, America found itself stuck paradoxically between its ideological identity as a bountiful melting pot and its reality as a state of de jure exclusion. I’m personally interested in this topic because my all of my grandparents witnessed it first-hand but in very different ways. While my father’s side were Italians who were only allowed into the country in the 1910s after denouncing the Catholic Church, my mother’s family were protestant Ulster Scots who in all likelihood probably hated Italians. This story of American immigration is alive and well today as still there are many who are denied at the southern border for their nationality or halted at the airport for practicing Islam. In fact, I have witnessed this cultural clash so many times at home that I sometimes do not notice it.

A few years ago I did witness this transnational migration in a way that was so visceral it is not burned into my memory. I was 16 and was on a visit to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. I had expected that Lewiston, like many places in Maine, would be overwhelmingly poor and white in population and snowy and postindustrial in aesthetics. For this reason I was surprised to encounter a group of black women brandishing baskets and what looked like African garb drudging up a hill through the snow. If I had seen the same thing in a place as notably cosmopolitan as New York City I would not have batted an eye, but it seemed odd to walk past a group of people who seemed so out of place in such an isolated town. It was only after speaking with a professor at the university campus that I learned that the women were part of a group of over 12,000 Bantu Somali immigrants who moved to the city at the turn of the 21^st century. Though this group had been first relocated by the U.S. Government from Somalia to Clarkston, Georgia, there they were housed in only low-rent and poverty-stricken inner city neighborhoods. Somehow taking notice of Lewiston, which had good and affordable housing due to underpopulation from deindustrialization, over 12,000 Bantu immigrants flocked there and were followed by other members of the Somali diaspora.

Like many immigrants, the Somalis were not met with open arms and in 2002, Lewiston’s mayor wrote an open letter to leaders of their community predicting that their arrival would have terrible consequences for the city and asking for them to halt further immigration. And just a few months later, a white nationalist group from Illinois traveled to Lewiston to hold a demonstration against them. But the critics were wrong. And in 2010 the Lewiston Sun Journal used census data to reveal that Somali entrepreneurs had reinvigorated the city’s previously derelict downtown and that Somali farmers, many of whom had previously worked on farms in Somalia under a system of slavery, had increased the county’s agricultural output considerably. Even the soccer team of the local high school benefitted as Somali children helped them win several successive state championships for the first time in their history.

Today, Lewiston still has the largest concentration of Somalis in America. Like so many immigrants they have been the targets of hatred and doubt only to prove themselves exceptional. In so many ways this story so perfectly exemplifies the awkward and imperfect nature of immigration and its role in transnational and global history. I just hope that that somewhere down the line these immigrants are more accepting of the next group.

This week’s readings threw me back into taking HI2001. I remember when I first read the module’s description, it sounded like the last thing I wanted to do. Luckily I had Andrew Cecchinato as my tutor, and he ran insightful and extremely helpful tutorials to clarify any lectures that we thought were too confusing. I remember admitting a few weeks in how the module was not as bad as I had originally thought it would be, though there were definitely some lectures and concepts that I had trouble understanding and never wanted to explore again! There were only a handful of lectures that I found really memorable, but among them were Konrad Lawson’s lecture on transnational and global history and the lecture (I think given by Ana del Campo) on microhistory, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History had a week on microhistory.

Since then I have always felt a connection with microhistory, since my essay for HI2001 was on the question: How far do micro-historical and everyday life history approaches fail to see the ‘big picture’ of the past? I had argued that instead of failing to see the ‘big picture’ of the past, microhistorians and everyday life approaches increase it by widening the scope of observation to engage in a dialogue between evidence and context, and can draw even further conclusions on topics that people have thought were already done and dusted. I was surprised at how much I had enjoyed doing research for this essay, as I remember the first time I looked at the essay questions offered, I was quite overwhelmed by the amount of topics of which I had then known nothing about.

I had read Tonio Andrade’s ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, while doing research for the essay, but ultimately did not end up referencing it in my final submission. Despite this, I found it a very different experience reading it in the context of MO3351, rather than reading it while having a very targeted essay question in mind. It was almost as if I was reading it for the first time, even though I recognised the title right away. Within the context of this module, I found that it was easier to keep an open mind, whereas previously I had been searching for specific moments that would support my essay argument, which let the narrative flow more smoothly, and made the piece as a whole seem more approachable. I was better able to see the transnational connections between individuals and places, forming a more cohesive and insightful piece. Perhaps if I had to write the same essay now, I would include Andrade’s piece; maybe it’s because I have a better understanding of transnational history than I did then, or maybe because I can better understand both the global and micro narrative that was constructed – who knows.

One of the sources I referenced that I particularly enjoyed was Sigurður Gylfi Magnusson’s ‘Far-reaching microhistory: the use of micro historical perspective in a globalized world’, Rethinking History 21:3 (2017). This was a very interesting piece in which Magnusson wrote a microhistory on a farmer called Jón Bjarnason of Þórormstunga in Vatnsdalur, north Iceland in the nineteenth century. Jón had written a multi-volume manuscript that was a collection of natural sciences, general knowledge, and geography. Magnusson uses Jón to draw deeper connections between Icelandic peasants and the views of world history during that time. On reflection, Magnusson’s piece could serve as a piece of transnational history, as he considers Iceland’s role and experience in the networks of knowledge-gathering and information-spreading in the 19th century. I would definitely recommend Magnusson’s work to anyone who is further interested in microhistory, Scandinavian perspectives, or the broader themes and cultures of the nineteenth century.

Other case studies I used for the essay could also be interpreted in a transnational lens, which leads me to the question of whether all types of microhistory can also be types of transnational history? I suppose it could in some cases, such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms offering reflections on concepts of culture between European social classes. Another case study I looked at George R. Stewart’s Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863. Stewart covers a period of only fifteen hours to micro-analyse an event that lasted roughly twenty minutes. In one of the first works to include ‘microhistory’ in the title, Stewart does not necessarily draw connections between his micro-subject and wider global themes – what he focuses on instead is explore what Pickett’s Charge can reflect on the broader topic of the American Civil War, and the human nature of those who are at war. Perhaps Stewart’s work could be somehow be used in a larger comparison of those at war, exploring the experiences of soldiers both in a national context and a transnational context. That could be interesting! In cases such as these, where the final conclusions end up being more localised to one geographic location or one nationality, I suppose they are not necessarily a type of transnational history. But perhaps this is because the author did not intend for it to represent transnationalism, or because the author simply did not push their investigations further to see how it could reflect transnationalism. I guess that raises another question of if everything is transnational history if the right transnational questions are asked and the transnational perspective is acknowledged.

Microhistory is definitely a subject that I would like to pursue further, or at least dabble in a bit more. I love how you can focus on a topic, object, person, place, etc. that might seem small in comparison to other things, but really can provide a deeper understanding to a larger topic or theme. It makes me wonder about all the endless possibilities of what could be used to create a microhistory and then could be further examined within the contexts of transnational perspectives.

This week’s readings focused on labels, attempts to try and make send of time and space. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that historians love a definition. Even though global history is larger than borders, it still is confined to space, and uses existing terms and methodologies with this. The discussion of space within Space and Scale in Transnational History really made me think this week, about how easy it is to get bogged down in the metaphorical. It is easy to detach different schools of thought from reality, which is where microhistory really stands apart.

By rooting an understanding of different actors (an IR term but I couldn’t think of a historical equivalent) and ideas within a localised understanding, it makes history more accessible. Microhistory gives us access to people’s lives. Even though it is global and not confined to borders, does not mean that we do not understand and recognise what they are. I really enjoyed Owen’s use of Steven Walsh as a current example of a transnational ‘connector’. Even though he has travelled to several different countries, he is still confined to nations on a spatial level. The national associations help to narrow down the search and make the spread of infection easier to understand. Additionally, his own nationality has assisted in his recovery. There is also an element in the fact that he is British, and therefore his treatment and subsequent recovery would perhaps be different that to those who he unknowingly have affected.  These national authorities are forced to take responsibility whether they would like to or not. What this further re-emphasizes is the argument that transnational is still inherently national, only that more players are involved. To disregard national borders is  to disregard space that has been carefully carved by previous historians and actors.

 Microhistory allows us to see specific examples and case studies of perhaps much bigger issues. Global emergencies are only made real when we see individuals. Twenty-four hour news coverage means that often we become detached from stories that are constantly evolving for weeks or months. Yet when the whistle-blower doctor Li WenLiang died of the virus last week, it caused an international outcry against the Chinese government. It turned a lot of the coverage from fear to rage, anger at how this could have been further prevented. This particular case, his death provokes questions of more than just disease, but wider cultural understanding and the political climate. Only through a specific lens and focus are we able to debate this, something microhistory allows us to do on a very big scale.