MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

When we consider microhistory, it is almost always in an analytical and academic context. While it is obviously impossible to escape some degree of bias, the historian is only human after all, an attempt at objectivity is the order of the day. This does not mean that this approach is universal, however. In this post, I will discuss one of the most famous works of what could be considered micro-history, and one that resists strongly the idea that microhistory must inherently be an academic and non-partisan affair.

Fanshen was published in 1966 by William Hinton, a Marxist sinologist. Having come to China to act as a tractor technician for the United Nations relief effort, Hinton experienced the victory of the People’s Liberation Army over the Kuomintang first-hand. He went on to write a history of the revolution which followed Mao Zedong’s victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. This all seems to be interesting but not entirely relevant to the subject of microhistory. However, the relevance of Fanshen to the discipline is revealed by its tagline A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Hinton explained the effects of the total reorganisation of Chinese society through the prism of the village of Zhangzhuangcun, which he referred to as “Long Bow”.

The book details first the privations of rural existence in China before the revolution along with its inequalities. Along with statistics about the region, Hinton uses many anecdotes to illustrate the scale of inequality, such as that peasants were forbidden from relieving themselves in their own fields but instead had to do so in the fields of their landlord. The subsequent revolution is similarly described, with breathless descriptions about the many meetings and changing laws that characterised the change from feudalism to CPC rule.  Key to the particular relevance of “Long Bow is that it was occupied by the Japanese, and so did not experience the pre-war efforts at land reform, and so experienced the greatest change following the victory of the communists. It is for this reason that Hinton named the book “Fanshen”, which literally means “to turn over”. This allowed Hinton to, through careful study of a single village, reveal a great deal about China’s condition as a whole, especially how it had changed thanks to the revolution.

Fanshen was one of the most popular books about the Chinese Revolutions, and one of the most popular microhistories, published. However, it was not a non-partisan work. As has already been mentioned, Hinton was a Communist, and would go on to live in China for much of his life, becoming a vocal critic of the Dengist transition to “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” by the end of his life. He thanks in the acknowledgments the “Communist Party and the People’s Government of Lucheng County”, as well as a host of leftist American intellectuals. Amusingly the acknowledgments also include a Milton Friedman, although this refers to Hinton’s attorney, who secured the release of his papers from the Senate Committee on Internal Security, not the libertarian economist. The book was one of the first glimpses of what life inside the PRC was like and had an impact comparable to Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. It is clear that microhistory can be written, and can in fact be incredibly successful, outside of a purely academic context.

It is too easy to forget that history is essentially the study of people who once lived. I use the term “people” instead of “actor” or “subject” or “figure” because that’s who they were: people. As important as thinking about our subject is in terms of its theory, its approaches, its varying scales of practice, etc., I find that it’s important to remind ourselves that when we study history, we need to remember that historical people were people. Just like us, they had their own loves, fears, desires, ambitions, and possessed all the other myriad qualities that made them, and make us, human.

Microhistory, and as I’ve learned of this past week, global microhistory, are highly valuable approaches to our subject. When written properly, such histories are able to write from the perspective of the “local” to answer big historical questions, answer the “so what” question, and perhaps most importantly, engage with the essential humanity of the peoples of the past they address. In past seminars, I’ve voiced my concern with how history runs the risk of becoming too detached from a public readership, as well as how the subject needs to be able to relate its studies on more personal, intimate levels. Microhistory and its global counterpart do just that.

Like Charmaine, I was very much taken by the Andrade piece; it’s been quite a while since I was so engaged with a piece of historical writing. Unlike much of the academic writing I read, it was written in the form of a narrative, one written with a stylized prose that made its text feel exciting and fresh. Take for example this passage, which I feel really showcased the “human factor” of Koxinga’s war with the Dutch:

A secretary dipped pen in ink. Who was he, they asked, and why had he come? He said his name was Sait and he’d come because he couldn’t stand it any more, the way Koxinga and his soldiers mistreated him and the other Chinese farmers. Koxinga’s soldiers pressed them constantly for money. They forced them to chop bamboo and bring it to his headquarters. They demanded all the stockpiles of rice and sugar without paying anything and even made them bring it themselves and load it on Koxinga’s ships. He and the other farmers had given up working their fields, knowing that whatever they harvested this year would be stolen from them. Now the worms ate through the rice stalks even as Koxinga’s soldiers and the poorer Chinese were dying from hunger. This year’s harvest would be terrible, he said, the worst he’d ever seen.

Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, No. 4 (December 2010), 578-579.

This is an exciting history: one that is both narratively engaging whilst also able to answer academic questions and open up new lines of inquiry. I must admit that I am rather biased in my admiration of this approach: my ideal historical work is one that combines the best aspects of academic and popular history. In my view, the best historical works are those that can both appeal to a general public and push the field forward. The works of Jill Lepore, H.W. Brands, and Gerard DeGroot are some of my favorite historians because they take such an approach to their work. (Lepore herself wrote a very nice article on microhistory that I will link here.) The very methodology and writing of microhistory seem like they are uniquely geared to produce the type of history I love and admire most.

The pieces authored by our very own Bernhard Struck et al. and Ghobrial are also worth mention; if the Andrade article demonstrated the ambitions and end result of transnational historical practice, Struck and Ghobrial provide the framework and methodology necessary for the writing of such works. I’m particularly intrigued by the fusion of microhistorical method with transnational history’s scale and perspective, and what kinds of history may be produced by such a union. As noted by Ghobrial, global microhistory allows the historian to engage with detail and root their work in the local and personal in order to better conceptualize the global. If such an approach doesn’t provide new, ambitious insights unto already well-known pasts, I don’t know what will.

Nevertheless, I was very happy to have been able to read histories over the past two weeks that emphasize humanity in their approaches (I very much enjoyed last week’s readings on Transnational Lives). I myself often forget that the historical forces we study had tangible, serious impacts on the peoples of the past. We must honor them by writing histories that better understand them and their times, that realize connections and concepts they may have never conceived of. We must write history that is meaningful to the past and our present.

A British man travels from Britain to Singapore for a business conference, and then returns home shortly after, via France, where he stops for a few days for a skiing holiday. In today’s world, in the age of multi-national corporations and a burgeoning British middle class with expendable income for winter vacations, this story does not sound particularly unique or worthy of any special consideration. However, this is a record of the activity of Steven Walsh, a man connected to the spread of the coronavirus from Asia into Europe, infecting 11 people during his time in France.

We have spoken a few times in class about disease and its nature as a transnational ‘connector’, and it is evident that the current coronavirus, or COVID-19, epidemic will prove no exception in the historical record. Steven Walsh, as a transnational ‘actor’, contracted the disease from someone with a connection to Wuhan, China, was able to travel from Singapore to France, and then France to the UK, and his infection went undetected, due to a lack of displaying symptoms. However, his own detection of the illness, and confirmation by the NHS, raised a critical logistical issue for British authorities; to trace any contact Walsh had made between his time of infection in Singapore to the confirmation of his diagnosis in London, further complicated by his stop-over in France. Two transnational networks are born, exist and grow in tandem as a result of this outbreak: one of the infected ‘actors’, who are connected through their lines of infection, and the other of the ‘actors’ and ‘organisations’, who connect in their attempts to trace this first network across geographical boundaries.

Fortunately, it has since been reported that Walsh has made a full recovery and discharged from hospital, but his infection both hospitalised a further 11 people (and potentially more) and sparked a requirement for a significant search for any potential contacts he had made throughout his journey, and any contacts of those infected contacts, illustrating its continued impact past his recovery.

Zooming out, what stories such as that of Steven Walsh, and there will be many globally in the case of this virus, illustrate about the nature of the world today is two-fold. Firstly, it highlights the high volumes of people that travel in and out of, and around, China (somewhat exacerbated by Chinese New Year, a public holiday and thus a particularly popular time for travel). While creating many more cases of both aforementioned transnational networks, it primarily shows evidence of a increasingly globalised world. This growth in globalisation, and its product of such ease of access to, and popularity of, international travel, facilitates an additional dimension to the spread of viral infections in a way that many previous epidemics in history have not.

However, secondly, stories such as Walsh’s have undoubtedly contributed to the international response taken by many countries, firstly by the United States and followed by other countries such as Australia, to close borders to non-citizens who have visited China recently, contrary to the advice of the World Health Organisation. The ensuing debate between the political administrations of the United States and China about their respective responses to the situation, whether a lack of transparency or a lack of support and fear mongering, highlights the friction and fractures that exist within the constitutive elements of this globalised world.

Christian DeVito & Anne Gerritsen, in their introduction to Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour, suggest that ‘it is possible to overcome the binary division between global and local by combining micro-analysis with a spatially aware approach’ (p. 2). Indeed, this example shows how the details of one case study can reveal a great deal about the wider circumstances of the global network in which it takes place. While Tonio Andrade’s article gave an insight into the colonial and capitalist nature of 17th century Taiwan, the movement of this coronavirus, the ‘connector’, reveals much about the nature of our world today.

As we watch Sait paddle away from the Dutch, we reflect on how his life became entangled with the large-scale structures and themes historians enjoy analysing. His life and, eventually, his (spoiler!) untimely death all occur within the context of Dutch colonialism and a war between the Dutch and the Chinese. Overall, his experiences and interactions with colonialism and war undoubtedly shaped his worldview, his reasoning, and his actions up until his very last breath. Altogether, this story serves as an exemplar for the ‘global microhistory’ that Tonio Andrade believes historians should focus on. I came away from this week’s readings with the impression that ‘global microhistory’ is a way of practicing and doing transnational history that grounds abstract concepts, like ‘war’ and ‘capitalism’, in the experiences of ordinary individuals. Because of this grounding, global microhistory becomes relevant and personal to us, and this is what makes it engaging. Reading twenty-odd pages seems like a chore to most students, myself included, but I tore through Andrade’s article like it was nothing. I wanted to know what happened to Sait, and I found it so cool to think that his experiences had greater significance and meaning than what we see at a first glance.

But ‘coolness’ isn’t a good enough reason, on its own, to pursue global microhistory. Sure, a global microhistorical approach is relevant and personal to the reader, but so what? Why does it matter?

Without microhistory, global history is essentialising. In arguing that the world is tied together with universal experiences of It does not account for local specificities, and for In order to answer this question, I turn to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. De Sousa Santos argues that knowledge in the world is dominated by a ‘Western hegemony’. This Western hegemony presupposes that there is only one way of knowing and perceiving the world. Instead, de Sousa Santos argues that there are ‘ecologies of knowledge’, or more than one way of knowing and perceiving the world. This is because knowledge is not a Platonic form that simply exists, or an objective ideal that we strive to achieve and accumulate an infinite amount of. Knowledge is ‘situated in the world’, and is an ‘intervention-in-reality’; a way of seeing, in a nutshell, that is determined by our cultural context and our own experiences. And, because our ability to know is defined by our individual experiences which, in turn, maps onto the way we interpret and see things, the amount that we can know within our own way of knowing is limited. We can only begin to see ‘beyond’ our framework is by understanding other ways of knowing. Then, by comparing a multitude of different frameworks with each other, we can acquire a broader, more reflective knowledge that doesn’t just understand the world, but also understands the limitations of human knowledge overall. Overall, de Sousa Santos argues that we need to think of the world as consisting of different ‘epistemologies’, or modes of thought. This framework allows us to account for subaltern epistemologies: other conceptions of the world that conflict and differ from Western ones.

Ultimately, de Sousa Santos’s work answers the ‘so what’ question and gives us a reason to support global microhistory. In assuming that experiences of ‘capitalism’, for instance, are universal, global history isn’t just essentialising. It is also promoting a singular, Eurocentric way of thinking about the world. If multiple ecologies of knowledge, and thus multiple ways of seeing the world exist, then this means that there is no one kind of structure and theme that ties the world together – no one ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘neoliberalism’, or ‘war’. Thinking that there is only one kind of structure is deeply-essentialising and Eurocentric. As such, it would be wrong for a global historian to employ a wide-scale approach and make sweeping generalisations about the world. It is not good enough to say that ‘x was affected by capitalism’. Instead, de Sousa Santos tells us we must examine the way capitalism was imagined in the minds of individuals, and how these affected their perception and experience of history overall. We also ought to compare the way in which capitalism conflicts with and fits into each locality’s unique epistemology.

Overall, global microhistory can help us respond to de Sousa Santos’ criteria. By employing global microhistory as a methodology, the historian is given a way to address big structures in relation to the epistemologies and experiences of localities. Of course, someone might object to this and say that this methodology is too demanding and, thus, too idealised. Sure, it’s natural to want to write history without making sweeping generalisations. But asking the historian to alter their own mode of thought to understand someone else’s epistemology? That’s a big ask. Nevertheless, I think that global microhistory paves the way to writing a history that analyses the world from different perspectives and modes of thought.

Carlo Ginzburg’s highly acclaimed exploration of the life of Dominico Scandella (popularly known as Menocchio) – a sixteenth-century miller – is the first thing that jumps to my mind when thinking about Microhistory. It is one of the best examples of an individual life from a specific locality being linked to broader historical themes, namely the religious intolerance of the Counter-Reformation and the productive interactions of high and low culture in pre-industrial Europe. Given my familiarity with this text, I thought it could be interesting to approach it from the fresh angle of transnational history. How effectively does Ginzburg track the circulation of ideas that contributed to Scandella’s transgressive and convoluted cosmology? How does he bridge the gap between the local and the global, the specific and the general? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to answer in this blog post.

The blurred boundaries between elite and popular cultures is one of the most important themes of the book. Menocchio was a miller living in the Friuli region – a rural part of Italy. Seen through the lens of traditional categorisations, he was a lower-class citizen, a proletarian. His cultural background was heavily determined by peasant oral tradition. Yet his complex cosmology, which included surprisingly progressive views such as the toleration of other beliefs and the differentiation of the spirit and the soul, were undoubtedly influenced by the humanistic literature he came into contact with. The confluence of these different cultural influences translated into strikingly original views expressed by Menocchio during his trials, demonstrating the productive interstices between high and low culture. By working backwards from the trial transcripts to the texts known to have been in Menocchio’s possession, such as Bocaccio’s Decameron, Mandeville’s Travels, and Il Sogno del Caravia, Ginzburg attempts to trace the journey of ideas, from origin to interpretative expression. The edifice of Menocchio’s ideas was built from the ‘stones and bricks’ drawn from his selective reading, and held together by the mortar of his peasant logic.

The dangers of broadening the implications of Menocchio’s case to include his historical peers are obvious: Menocchio was atypical, a recluse, shunned by many (including his family) for his unorthodox views, and therefore unrepresentative. Parallels and patterns can only be drawn from such an unusual case study with great caution. Menocchio demonstrates that ideas did circulate, crossing class boundaries and spawning new ideas, but gives no indication of the extent to which religious paradigms were being questioned at the time. It’s a tough one. Writing a story about an average citizen, living an average life with average ideas and average achievements does not make for a very spicy tale. Taking the more marketable path by writing about an exceptional figure, however, makes it hard to draw links, to ground the story in the reality of common experience.

Is this just another angle from which to consider the local/global, specific/general problem? Even the most average story will include certain details that make it unique. But that particular uniqueness emerges from outside influences, a configuration of reality resulting from connections, networks, transitory ideas and artefacts. To unpack these, the historian must look beyond the local. The specific/local is but a compound consisting of multiple elements of the general/global that happened to come together in a specific spatio-temporal context. The historian must become a scientist. The compound must be broken up into its composite components. To do this effectively, working backwards seems to be the key; like Ginzburg’s tracking back from Menocchio’s testimony to humanistic ideas that achieved global circulation, the local must be used as a doorway to the global. Microhistory is therefore a valuable entry point for the transnational historian.

On 19 November 2018, Carlos Ghosn traveled aboard his private jet from his vacation home in Beirut to his family home in Tokyo. The journey should have been a routine one for Ghosn, a then CEO of both Nissan and Renault and the first person ever to be at the helm of two fortune 500 companies simultaneously, but upon landing he was caught with surprise as Japanese officials placed him under arrest for questioning with allegations of embezzlement and false accounting. That same day, Nissan announced that Ghosn had been removed as CEO and dismissed from the company entirely. Media reports claim that Ghosn had stolen tens of millions of US dollars from Nissan by means of a shell in order to purchase homes in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Paris, and Amsterdam, and New York as well as fund dozens of lavish vacations.

Under Japanese law, Ghosn was able to be held for 23 days without any criminal charges being filed against him and thus without bail. At the end of this period, however, Japanese prosecutors charged Ghosn and one of his associates with “underreporting of deferred compensation”, a charge which although not serious, allowed him to be held for another several weeks without bail. This process continued until Ghosn’s arraignment on 8 January 2019 when he came out publicly for the first time since his arrest to claim innocence and plead for bail. Once again, though, Ghosn was denied bail. It was only in March that Ghosn was finally offered a bail of nine million US dollars with the agreement that he would remain under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance with no internet access, but was arrested once again after tweeting “I’m ready to tell the truth.” Finally, in April Ghosn posted bail and was allowed out on house arrest, marking 108 days since he had first been detained and four months since he had been allowed to see his family. During his time in Japanese custody, Ghosn was allegedly at times kept in solitary holding, denied his lawyer, and violently interrogated—all of this without ever being convicted of a crime.

On 30 December 2019, over a year after his initial arrest, something extraordinary happened. Ghosn escaped his house, disappeared out of thin air, and reappeared in Beirut the next morning. In a statement released to the New York Times, Ghosn said that he would “no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant and basic human rights are denied,” and that he had not fled, but “escaped injustice and political persecution”.

Though there are many theories as to how Ghosn was able to escape to Beirut, they are not important to this course. Rather, what is relevant about Ghosn is his identity as a transnational criminal because of not only his refusal to adhere to the rules of one country, but also because of his unique background. Ghosn was born in Rio de Janiero and spent the first years of his life there before moving to Beirut. There, he studied at French schools before moving to Paris for university. After graduating as an engineer, Ghosn worked for Michelin Tyres in both France and Germany before being appointed as an executive of Michelin South America in Rio de Janiero. Soon, he was promoted to CEO of Michelin North American division and moved to Greenville, South Carolina where he spent several years raising his family. Finally, Ghosn moved to Japan to aid in a merger between Renault and Nissan, eventually becoming CEO of both companies and staying there until his escape in 2019.

While one does not necessarily need to ever leave their home to participate in transnational history, Ghosn is in many ways the embodiment of the transnational citizen and businessman. Moving constantly throughout his life, Ghosn learned to speak four languages fluently, secured three citizenships, and bought property in seven countries. As we have seen in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, there are many people who have lived this ‘transnational life’, but what makes Ghosn interesting to me is not his background, but rather his ability to leverage it along with his influence to reject the Japanese justice system and secure freedom.

This week I was struck when reading by a number of considerations made within each article that I personally had not actively considered myself thus far in studying.

The first of these that I found interesting was the consideration between differences in the northern and southern hemisphere. As an area of divide, especially when considering imperial and colonial narratives, we are often sucked into a division between the east and west. While this East West divide is apparent, I found interesting to think more of a North and South division. When taking this consideration into the spread of people and ideas and movement I find myself thinking more about the effects of different climates, traditions and cultures and languages, all things that meant that the people and communities in these areas developed completely differently from how we have. While I believe the east-west divide will still always hold a place, the North-South differences will now create a new area of consideration in my studies.

Something else that I found interesting during the reading was the consideration of the development and impact of penal colonies on transnational and global developments. Although something I have always been aware of, studying the penal colonies of the British empire is not something that I have done in depth. When I think about it, it makes complete sense that they would have had a massive impact on the development of the communities that grew from these colonies. What I don’t think I had fully considered was the extent to which many of these would have becoming a melting pot, filled with people from many more cultures and communities from around the empire than even some trading ports may have been.

I have always been interesting in the travel and movement of people. This idea of a forced migration and how people adapted and influenced a communities development I find particularly interesting and am definitely considering researching further to maybe eventually use this area as a broad theme for my coursework going forward.

This past week, I spent some time researching ideas for my short essay when I found something that really made me reflect on the methods and concepts we have been learning so far. 

I knew starting my research that I really wanted to write about the historiography around Transnational History and Gender History in Latin America (or Iberoamerica). From what I have seen so far there is much less development on the field of Transnational History in Latin America when compared to Europe, the United States or Asia. I also haven’t really gotten the chance to study Latin America in university almost at all, there are no modules in either History or IR (the other half of my degree) which focus on any country/countries in Central or South America. It is also deeply personal to me, I was born in Spain to Brazilian parents, and grew up between Madrid, Buenos Aires and São Paulo – whilst always attending an English speaking school. The way that I experience Latin identity and culture is inherently transnational, so there was no better starting point for my research project. 

The first article I came across is an article by Michel Gobat, titled The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy and Race. Out of all the things this article could have focused on, I would have never thought before reading it that it focused on the history of the term “Latin America”. Gobat explains how the term emerged in the mid 19th century, at a time when the continent was attempting to distance itself from U.S. and European Imperialism and also find a common identity for its people. 

In the early 1800s citizens of the region referred to themselves as Americans, or Americanos. Slowly this term become popularised in the United States, and both the North Americans (who viewed the South Americans as ‘less white’) and the South Americans wanted a new term to highlight their cultural differences. America then became Spanish or Hispanic America. This new  term, which did recognise a common culture and language  was too tied to Spanish monarchical rule at a time where the continent prided itself in independence, it also excluded Brazil, the region’s Hegemon. There was also turn in U.S. expansionism post-1848 towards the Southern Hemisphere as the U.S. tried to create the idea of of a common American Identity, but one which believed on the North’s responsibility to dominate the ‘lesser race’ of the South.

The term ‘Latin America’ emerges as a response to all of these problems, yet it is not as simple as that. Gobat presents that there were two discourses regarding the term at at the time. There were those who constructed the term in opposition to Anglo-Saxon influence, and believed the term to include all races as long as they were Catholic and Spanish/Portuguese speakers. However, another group, came to identify the term ‘Latin’ exclusively with whiteness – they saw the whites in the North as descendants of the Anglo-Saxon’s and the whites in the south as descendant of the ‘Latin’ countries, Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. They knew that the north regarded them as belonging to a ‘lesser white’ and more effeminate Spanish race so they aimed to create a ‘more white’, more masculine, Latin race (perhaps this is the beginning of ‘macho’ culture in Latin America, but that story is for another blog post).

The term was set up to differentiate the white elites of the continent from the African or indigenous inhabitants, in this case, it was a term to separate identities rather than unite them. A term which aimed to combat U.S. and European domination was also set up to uphold colonial standards. It was a term to combat white privilege but to also enforce it, which demonstrates the anxieties around race and identity in the Americas at the time. 

I am glad to say that with hindsight, it was the first discourse surrounding the term which stuck. ‘Latin American’ today encompasses all of the people who have their roots south of the Mexican border – it is a term which today indeed does unite us, and a term which many have fought to be able to say proudly. Articles like this not only demonstrate the relevance of Transnational history in exploring the origins of something so ‘simple’ as a name, but also how Transnational history can help us uncover hidden gender, racial and class biases that have been overlooked which help us better understand the experiences and identities of those around us. 

At the closing of last week’s seminar, we discussed the word “transnational” itself, and whether people prioritised the ‘trans’ or the ‘national’ parts of the word. Personally, I like to emphasise transnational history’s ‘trans’ component over its ‘national’, but I found it extremely interesting to learn that there were some who preferred its ‘national’; I wonder whether my interpretation and emphasis will change by the end of the semester.

This week’s readings gave us even more concrete examples of how the framework/methodology of transnational history can be utilised. I chose to read the selections from Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present as I was curious to see how transnational history could be explored through the medium of biographies (or how biographies could be explored through the medium of transnational history). The introduction provided another useful outlook of how the authors intended to use the transnational framework to tell their stories, stating poignantly, “Lives elude national boundaries; but biography the telling of life stories, has often been pressed into the service of nation, downplaying its fleeting acknowledgement of lives lived in motion” (p. 2). I love the idea of “lives lived in motion”, I think it greatly exemplifies what transnational interpretations are here to represent and emphasise.

Looking at the first chapter by Martha Hodes, which explores the life of Eunice Connolly, a wife of a sea captain from the British West Indies, I was reminded of Milinda’s critique on the OXO essay, as Hodes used the framework of transnational history alongside a feminist investigation that was not explored in the OXO essay. This chapter in particular was helpful as it served as an example of how one can use other schools of historical thought or lens alongside transnational history. Hodes also discussed the challenges she experienced while writing: the challenges of writing a narrative that was both local and global, archival gaps, and proving the historical significance of Connolly’s transnational life. Her admittance of these difficulties exemplifies the challenges of transnational writing, but Hodes’s self awareness allowed her to delve even further in her analysis.

I most enjoyed chapter 15 by Penny Russell, and her analysis on Jane Franklin, who reached across borders to appeal for the search of her missing husband and his crew, who had gone on an arctic exploration and failed to return. There was a lot to unpack in Franklin’s story, where Franklin herself “blended her appeals to universal female sympathy, the bonds of the ‘civilised world’, the ties of a cosmopolitan scientific community and the special interests of nation” (p. 205).

Although I am still not sure about what direction to go in for my final project and imminent first essay, this week’s readings certainly gave me insight to the possibilities, and have given me a lot to think about.

My father, for as long as I can remember, has subscribed to the Economist. He will read each issue cover to cover, folding over the articles he thinks I should read (now he forwards them to me because, the internet) but this is the age before the iPad. He would religiously pour over Bagehot and Bartleby, but there was only one article I would read week in, week out. I always turn to the last page of the weekly edition and read the Obituary. In fear of sounding dreadfully morbid, I find it deeply fascinating to read about how one person can condense another person’s life to simply one page. The same can be said about writing biographies, or what this week’s reading focused on, calling it all kind of names, my favourite being life writing. It reminded me of life drawing, and has similar connotations. Writing biographies, or micro histories is simple one person’s perspective on another person’s life, just as a life-drawing class sees everyone drawing the same figure, but each sketch will look radically different from the next.

Biographies as a form of historical writing surely widens the canon, and allow for different a greater number of interests to be considered, both inside and outside academia. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that it ties so well to transnational themes. Microhistories, like the collection of perspectives, narratives and stories we read about this week are just a few examples of how public history is being more popular and accessible. Biographies are how a lot of children are first taught history, and are often categorized separately in bookstores to the rest of historical writing. Although there is more writing about some figures over others, the popularity of the ‘untold story’ in recent demonstrates the power of transnational lives but also of those who do not fit within the traditional ‘great man’ blueprint that a lot of the history section in Waterstones seems to focus on. One of the Christmas bestsellers this past year was Anne Glennconner’s Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown. Perhaps its popularity stemmed from the recent release of the third series of The Crown on Netflix, and the focus on Princess Margaret and the breakdown of her marriage to Lord Snowdon. It is a subversion of the way in which royal history has typically been approached, as some of these figures are still alive and therefore an intrusion into their personal lives is exacerbated within the media. Yet the autobiography clearly illustrates her perspective. It is not seen as absolute truth, merely a single opinion. It sparks the age old conversation around the British monarchy, about whether it should exist and the remits to which still remains relevant in today’s society.

This is a much larger question than one for simply the British public. The Queen’s links to the Commonwealth and a deeply colonial past is a global question, and one I think The Crown shows admirable attempts in addressing. The way in which events like the Suez Crisis are shown within the show are indicative that there are inherent dangers to the single story. The links to postcolonial scholarship and even this week’s reading Subaltern Lives is evident. Only after the period of decolonisation are we starting to learn about people who were considered previously subordinate. The complicated question is how we unpack this, due to the speed of globalisation and modernisation making it difficult to define terms. In the Transnational Lives introduction chapter it says that ‘global history is no freer than national history from limiting categorizations’. Historians are still bound by the same desire to create labels, terms, isms today as they were during the Enlightenment. Yet the awareness of everyone and everything else that is happening makes this process incredibly hard, almost like trying to catch a particular fish as the whole school migrates past. It is hard to keep track of ideas as they constantly evolve, but this is a change that should be welcomed within the discipline.  

It therefore seems natural to me, that global/transnational history follow along the same veins as life writing. Biographies and obituaries are often written by people who knew the person well, because they had some personal connection or understanding. Why are connections like these not made in all historical writing? People tend to have interest in what they study because of their backgrounds and upbringing, as this is what exposes them to different styles of education and opportunities. This social and cultural focus surrounds global history, and surely is something to be celebrated.

History is scattered with marginal figures and overlooked characters. Clare Anderson in ‘Subaltern Lives’ sees it as her mission to rescue some of these figures from the shadows, focusing on colonial subjects and attempting to shed light on the broader colonial trends reflected in their lives. Chapter 4 examines Narain Singh, a Sikh soldier incarcerated for his actions in the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1848-49 – a turbulent period during which Britain struggled to establish control over a restless Bengal. Singh was transported from prison to prison, condemned then acquitted for his role in instigating a mutiny onboard the Kaleegunga, then finally released, having reformed his views and pledged to support the British. Anderson pieces together fragments of guard testimonies, court evidence and correspondence to revive this figure, whose revelatory involvement in processes of intra-colonial transportation and class distinction had been left unexploited by historians of the field.

Singh’s treatment as a prisoner was heavily influenced by his rank and class. His Brahmin identity gave him benefits denied to regular lower-ranking thugs and ‘dacoits’. The fact that the death sentence for his implication in the Kaleegunga mutiny, which resulted in the deaths of three British soldiers, was revoked can be accredited to the degrading conditions in which a man of his rank was kept, triggering a reckless response. Evidence of Singh’s involvement in the mutiny was even given a heroic shine due to his status as a Brahmin warrior. Class also played a role in the conditions of his transportation, in defining the types of forced labour he was ascribed, and in facilitating his eventual release. I was intrigued by this hierarchy of colonial lawlessness that Anderson was alluding too. Even in prison, which I would have assumed to be the ultimate societal leveller, class distinctions thrived. In an attempt to connect this case study to transnational history, it is perhaps useful to consider the way concepts of class travel across national and cultural borders. Narain Singh’s preferential treatment is a perfect example of a hierarchy being imposed by an external legal agent (the British). Singh’s reference to his rank in the letters he sends to the British authorities exemplifies his realisation of the leverage he could gain from his Brahmin status. Processes of inter-cultural contact – the particularly intimate contact characteristic of political dissidence and punishment – clearly resulted in a communication of hierarchical values across the cultural border of Anglo-Bengali relations.

Such hierarchies, once transferred, did not stay fixed. The British tendency to move convicts away from their homelands with the purpose of isolating them from the cultures to which they belonged, resulted in mass movements of prisoners across the Indian mainland. The unintended result was the creation of new networks and routes of circulation that Anderson termed a ‘borderless penal cosmopolitanism’. ‘Networks’ and ‘circulation’ ring familiar bells in the context of transnational studies. These words suggest the beginnings of an interconnected Empire, a Raj linked by more than simply a centralised administration. The subjects themselves were in motion, and with that motion came the mixing of ideas. The transportation of political convicts across the subcontinent brought the most radical and subversive ideas into contact. I wonder how much of a leap it would be to associate intra-colonial convict transportation with the birth of Indian nationalism. This may seem ironic; flows and movements, typically associated with transnational phenomena, may in this case have contributed to a greater sense of Indian national unity in opposition to the British colonial aggressors.

Locating the transnational themes reflected in the life of Narain Singh was an interesting exercise. Armed with a competent knowledge of the tools and methods of transnational historical study, gained from the previous weeks’ readings, it was useful to tackle a text in which the connections were less explicit. This invited me to make the leaps myself, and to realise how the theory can be applied to tangible examples such as the life of a 19th century Sikh convict.

It is easy to think about transnationalism as a system of concepts. Ideological, cultural, psychological concepts all move across the globe, are changed in turn as they move and interact with other concepts, and so on. But to view transnationalism in this way is to make a simple but costly mistake. It is to forget about the vectors of these ideas, transnational people and their lives. It is they who carry these concepts with them as they travel, being changed and changing in turn as they do.

It is these figures whose lives, some of them at least, are documented in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity. It offers many fine points, such as the way in which a transnational approach to biographical history can rescue the “captive nations” subsumed by colonialism. Meanwhile the joint biography of Cliff Richard and Engelbert Humperdink, stressing their shared colonial upbringing. The contrast between their cultural role as paragons of uncomplicated “Englishness” and their more complicated actual origins sheds light on the cultural amnesia that separates the first and second halves of the twentieth century in modern Britain. However, the article which I found most interesting, and which led indirectly to the topic of this blogpost, was by Carroll Pursell, about Herbert Hoover, the 31^st President of the United States of America.

Before his ascension to the presidency, and before even the career in philanthropy that made his name, Hoover was an engineer. In this career he travelled all over the world, particularly to Asia and Oceania. This career, shaped as it was by both the colonialist and masculine mores of its day, played a large role in shaping Hoover as a man and ultimately as a president. Further, by investigating Hoover as an engineer, the broader subject of engineers as transnational subjects can be investigated. The American engineer in general is treated as a transnational subject, filling the ranks of empires across the globe. Pursell ties this into the American national idea, claiming that the imperial positions these engineers occupied represented an “imagined frontier”, to replace the subjugated American West.

So, what does this have to do with Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot, both named in this posts title? I would argue that it is interesting to consider both these leaders as transnational figures, just as it is with Hoover. However, while Hoover was a colonial figure interacting with the colonized world, both Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot were colonised figures. Both are remembered mainly as national figures, but it is a mistake to consider them only as that.

Going by the popular image of Ho Chi Minh, it might be thought that his status as a transnational figure would be best explored through his relationship with America. And he did author one of the most strikingly transnational political documents of the modern age, the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, in part with America in mind. Famously he began by quoting the American declaration of independence, that “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. This alone helps us to understand the hegemonic nature of American rhetoric and ideology. That the speech was written with the assistance of a Major in the OSS only compounds this. However just as important to our understanding of the transnational nature of Ho Chi Minh should be his relationship with France. Beyond the expected relationship between colonial power and first colonized subject and then revolutionary, Ho Ci Minh lived for many years in Paris, and was present for one of the first great transnational events of the twentieth century, the Versailles conference. To view him as a merely national figure is to ignore this important period in his life.

Similarly to Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot status as a merely national figure should be challenged. Like Ho Chi Minh he spent a considerable period in the imperial metropole. However, unlike Ho Chi Minh, who washed dishes and wrote articles in Paris, Saloth Sar as he was then known was a student at the Sorbonne. This multi-national environment being the place where he was exposed to the books that informed much of his politics, such as the works of Stalin and Kropotkin. It has also been suggested that the style of writing and thinking which the Sorbonne inculcated in its students stayed with Pol Pot for the rest of his life. It has been said of many of his slogans, such as the infamous “To keep you is no gain, to lose you is no loss”, carried the ring of this education in them. So again, we see that these nationalist figures have far more transnational features to them than might be thought.

A particularly brave man, or one struggling to meet their word count, might continue this blogpost with a discussion about whether the SAS training camps which trained fighters in the coalition Pol Pot formed against Vietnam were in fact transnational spaces. However I am neither, and so will end this post here.

In our seminar earlier this week, Milinda made a point about the importance of considering the social relations that underlie the issues that we will encounter throughout our study of transnational and global history, and how considering different perspectives including the Marxist, the environmental, the postcolonial and the feminist can help with this.

This point particularly stuck with me, and one that I definitely thought warranted further exploration. Lucky for me, then, when a discussion of such practices appeared in this week’s readings. In the introduction to Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700 – Present, Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott suggest that the book ‘is inspired by feminist theory in its determination to show the public dimensions of the supposedly ‘private’, and how the family, sexuality and intimacy have lain at the core of social structures’ (p. 6).

In this collection, the authors, taking a microhistory approach, use individual case studies in order to illuminate a wider issue – one particular example of this that stood out to me was Martha Hodes’ chapter about Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly, and how an analysis of her life, through a feminist, intersectional lens, reveals more about the differences in the construction of race and racial hierarchies between North America and the West Indies. Marriage to a ‘man of colour’ may have damaged her reputation in New England, but within the context of the West Indies, such a marriage into a ‘well-to-do coloured family’ elevated her to a higher social standing than she could ever have achieved in North America. Indeed, as Hodes writes, ‘Unstable and malleable racial categories do not diminish the power of race; rather, combined with geographical mobility, that instability and malleability only transfer power from certain people to certain other people. Within one national border, Eunice’s status diminished; within another, she rose in rank’ (p. 25).

The feminist framework, with its focus on the ‘private’ and, more generally, on women, particularly those usually excluded from the historical narrative, therefore enables the transnational historian to consider a wider cultural history and more ‘connectors’ that extend outside of the boundaries of the nation-state, providing an essential methodological tool to the field.

My introduction to the wider field of gender history through both HI2001 and the ‘Women and Men in Europe, 1500-1800’ module I took last semester has shown me the importance of this perspective to achieve a fuller understanding of any given historical narrative, particularly in how we understand the gendered nature of all historical actors, particularly men who often exist in the discourse as genderless beings. The role for the feminist approach in transnational history, as outlined by Deacon, Russell & Woollacott, has shown me the possibilities that exist within this field to explore such areas of gender history, and these are lessons that I aim to carry forward with me into my further research in this module.

Last week, we established that transnational history was a broad methodology that could be practiced and applied in a multitude of ways. This week’s readings sought to narrow down this definition by providing us with two specific examples of transnational history, Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present and Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920. These books introduced us to an application of transnational ideas to imperial history. Although both books were interesting, I latched onto one of Transnational Lives’ analytical framework. When we take specific people(s) as our case study, and analyse their lives through the use of a transnational framework, we see that boundaries defining their citizenship and identity are constantly being drawn and redrawn across other people’s lives and territories. [1] A single person’s body can thus becomes a product of transnationalism. Inspired by the anthropologist, George Marcus, this analysis seeks to ‘follow the people’, ‘follow the thing’, and/or ‘follow the story’ to produce a ‘multi-sided ethnography’ that captures the entanglements one person’s life has with another person. [2] In turn, these entanglements are picked up on by historians and linked back to a big claim about how transnationalism has impacted a historical agent’s sense of identity.

This is the kind of analytic framework that I hope to use in my project. La Caridad 78 is a Chinese-Cuban restaurant in New York City. It is the site of three converging cultures and identities: Cuban, Chinese, and American. I wish I could say that I discovered it serendipitously whilst wandering around NYC, but the truth is less glamorous – I’ve never been to NYC. Instead, I found it on YouTube when I should have been working. Aside from serving up fusion food, like ‘lo mein de la casa with chuletas fritas’, the waiters there speak a combination of Cantonese, English, and Spanish. [3] How did a bunch of Chinese people end up in Cuba, before finally settling in America? Chinese people originally settled in Cuba in the mid-1800s to work on sugar plantations alongside African-Americans. These same workers then went on to fight alongside the Cubans in the wars of Cuban Independence, before finally leaving Cuba after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. [4] Although I’ve still got a long, long way to go with research, my current thought is that the movement of these Chinese-Cuban migrants cannot be disentangled from the Cold War. By choosing to either stay in Cuba or leave to America, identities within this community were split along ideological lines and were, perhaps, influenced by feelings of animosity and friendship between China and Cuba on the one hand, and Cuba and America on the other hand. [5] Overall, this case study of a restaurant in New York lends itself to the transnational approach articulated above. Even if my current thoughts end up being wrong, I hope that using this analytic framework more will help me uncover entanglements in places that I wouldn’t expect.

Citations:

[1] Deacon Desley, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present (2010), p. 5

[2] George E. Marcus, ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sided Ethnography’ in Annual Review Anthropology, Vol. 24 (1995)

[3] Lok Siu, ‘Chino Latino Restaurants: Converging Communities, Identities, and Cultures’ in William Luis, Afro-Hispanic Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, Afro-Asia (Spring 2008), p. 161

[4] Ibid, pp. 163-165

[5] Ibid, p. 165