MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

When I was first introduced to the field of micro history last year in MI2001, I found the concept fascinating and I took great pleasure in reading Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre. Once again, this past week, I found myself enthralled in our readings on the connections between micro history and global history. Up until this point, I had failed to see the connections between the two approaches to writing history. Now it seems somewhat obvious that these two approaches are complementary, and when used in conjunction with each other, a history can be produced which pays attention to the individual threads which make up the fabric of a historical narrative. The inclusion of micro-historical perspectives can greatly enhance the possibilities of exploration offered by global history, as Christian De Vito and Anne Gerritsen’s concept of “micro-spatial history” demonstrates. Perhaps micro history holds authors more accountable to the people, ideas, and spaces they seek to shed light on. As John-Paul A. Ghobrial argues – “micro-historical methods can offer what Francesca Trivellato has called a ‘healthy dose of critical self-reflexivity into the practice of global history.” 

While I agree with Ghobrial’s sentiments, I think that micro history can have even more profound outcomes in that it allows historians to include a great deal of empathy and human connection in their writing. By telling the story of a single human being or a specific object, a time and place that is geographically and chronologically distinct from the one the reader occupies can be transplanted into the realm of the familiar. While reading Tonia Andrade’s piece, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory”, I found myself enthralled in the text, almost as if I were reading a novel centered around the life of this Chinese farmer named Sait. The tragic story of this man’s death not only gave me a window into life in the Dutch colony of Taiwan in 1661, but it also allowed me to understand the perspectives offered by different segments of the population living there and gave me the opportunity to consider some of the reasons why the Dutch commanders failed to defeat the Chinese forced led by Koxinga. This work called upon me to consider the common humanity shared between me and this Chinese farmer, and certain details, such as the descriptions of Koxinga’s torture tactics really stuck with me. I think a micro historical approach, in addition to contributing valuable insights into the field of global history, might be very effective in piquing the wider public’ interest in historical studies. 

Turning now to my project, I think I want to write on something relating to the adoption of children across international borders or the differences between foster care systems worldwide and how this relates to varying cultural practices. In either case, I hope to incorporate a microhistorical perspective so that the individuals – the children, adoptive parents, foster parents, or whatever it ends up being about – shine through in my final project. However, Hannah’s recent blog post weighs heavy on my mind and I wonder if I will be able to do justice to these individuals as a American woman who only speaks english and has no personal experience in the realms of surrogacy, adoption or foster care. My knowledge on these subjects is restricted to research I did in high school on the American foster care system, focused primarily on the issues inherent in this national system. In any case, I hope these factors won’t be enough to stop me from creating a project which allows readers to see into a foreign place and time which is not theirs, just as Andrade’s piece did for me this week. 

When coming up for a project to explore within this module I had a few ideas. For instance, I wanted to explore the reasoning behind international media reaction to Bashar al-Assad’s regime’s use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War varying from country to country. When the first attacks were reported by American media outlets in 2012, many other media sources, for instance in South Asia and Central Europe, were very sceptical of the validity of American sources. To explore why some national medias supported American claims and why others questioned them was something I wanted to do because this cynicism was not coming from enemies of America, and nor was it coming from nations which supported Assad’s regime. However, this would have required lengthy ontological questions asking what lies at the foundations of “truth” and “power” and thus would better be written as a question in the field of IR. A few other questions also arose, for instance regarding why certain countries have similar single-citizenship policies, or how a single city in Pakistan has been able to monopolise the world’s football market, supplying something around 80% of the world’s footballs. Other topics that interested me included the role which remittances from America and the UK play in the Jamaican economy, or how natalist politics became popularised throughout the world in the 1920s. However, the topic I am currently looking at exploring is one that I have toyed with for a long time.

                        I am into all varieties of music, and I genuinely mean that. If it has a beat and a rhythm, I’ll happily “dance” (awkwardly sway) to it. However, in my earlier teen years I was really drawn to metal and alternative rock music. I burrowed deeper into the rabbit-hole as my tastes became more extreme and I got thoroughly stuck into some of the heavier Thrash and Death metal bands. Despite this, I could never bring myself to listen to Black metal. I despised the style of vocals (as opposed to a guttural growl as you would find in Death metal, Black metal singers tend to screech or employ flamboyantly emotional screaming which is incredibly harsh on the ears), the guitars were too high pitched, and the recording quality was generally awful (a stylistic choice from a lot of bands in an attempt to remain “hardcore” and “underground”). Also, they wear face-paint and massive needles on leather straps on their arms, which… just isn’t very cool. It was only when I got into more atmospheric music genres such as shoegaze, trance, or even some classical, that I began to appreciate the aspects of Black metal that draw so many people. When you attend a Black metal gig you don’t tend to see many people moshing. Rather, these people dressed in the most intimidating clothing they could find, really just stand about calmly listening to the band in a reflective mood, and if the purists are satisfied that the band was “good” enough then they might clap slightly at the end of the show. The reason these people don’t dance to the music they listen to is because its really too atmospheric to do so. “Sound-walling” is a technique used in many genres, but in Black metal it is almost ubiquitous, with the rapid riffs from the heavily distorted guitars designed to overwhelm the listener. The music’s intention is for the sound to sonically wash over the audience. It is a genre which explores themes of individualism, depression (probably the biggest, and occasionally a very problematic, theme in the genre), and anger, which fit well because of the sound’s ability to encourage reflection (for some people). It is a wonderfully diverse sound and that is why there is a vibrant and growing wave of shoegaze/Black metal bands collaborating with DJs and electro-pop musicians (particularly in France). That being said, I must now address huge problems within the Black metal music scene and why I have chosen to explore it.

                        To briefly condense the history of Black metal, I would say that it began as a form of Thrash metal with the English band, Venom (who coined the term “Black Metal” in their sophomore release) in the early 1980s with themes of Satanism and Anti-Christianity. As an aside, an Anglican priest attempted to convince a court to ban their records for containing subliminal messaging designed to turn teenagers into Satan-worshippers, which the band refuted because, with songs titled In League with Satan and Leave Me In Hell, they weren’t being particularly subliminal with the messaging. Venom’s style of music spread across Europe throughout the 1980s with bands such as Sweden’s Bathory and Switzerland’s Celtic Frost defining the sound of this underground scene, as well as its themes as a bunch of teenagers playing Anti-Christian music ironically to annoy their parents as well as their local community’s religious leaders. This changed in the early 1990s in Norway. A band called Mayhem defined what the modern genre’s sound is, but they also lent to the genre their brand of bigotry. As well as cassette tapes, they would also spread manifestos encouraging Europeans to return to Pre-Christian Paganism as a way to counter 1,000 years of globalisation and cosmopolitanism which had made the European man “effeminate”. Most members of the band and their inner circle had either been arrested for burning down churches (one member was convicted of arsons on at least three churches) and homophobic/racist attacks on others, or had been murdered by one of the other members of the band by 1993. The vile nature of the band’s membership only served to further popularise their music and, to a lesser but still troubling extent, their political messages.

                        One reason why I want to explore the transnational influence of Mayhem is because I believe there is a gap in current historical knowledge. It has become ubiquitous in political studies to refer to the late-1990s and early-2000s in terms of a nationalistic backlash, that in the Post-Cold War world the lack of choice in terms of ideological identity resulted in a “reversion” to national identity as the primary form of self-identification and group-formation. Hence, we have 20-30 years of ethnic conflict, religious extremism, and anti-globalisation movements around the world. Now this is of course a very overgeneralised view of Post-Soviet world history, but works such as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996) popularised this current of discourse. A big issue with this paradigm is that it holds a “West/the Rest” conception at its centre. “It’s the rest of the world: Muslims, Slavic, Asian, African, and South American peoples who are reacting badly to globalisation, not the west” is the sort of logic shown by adherents to this kind of discourse. Well, I would like to point out that anti-globalist movements are global, and the Black metal scene in the early 1990s is a perfect example of this within Europe and North America. There are other debates which can be benefited by introducing analysis of the Black metal music scene, such as debates revolving around the nature of stress, anxiety, and depression in modern society. Well, you have right in front of you a sub-genre of Black metal (called DSBM) dedicated to exploring such themes which is followed by millions (not many millions, but still millions) of, primarily young and European, people across the world, and the inclusion of this human experience as an historical fact would add an interesting avenue of exploration for any modern historian.

                        Following this exploration of what the inclusion of Black metal in history can provide for these questions of modern societal stress and anti-globalism, I would also be interested in focusing upon where modern Black metal music in Eastern Europe is now, and this is the broadly transnational experience that I may analyse as my term project. On one level, there are dozens of bands who tour various countries in Eastern Europe as part of a far-right and bigoted movement with members of their various organisations contributing to protests in the Ukraine, as well as shockingly travelling overseas to appear at pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and far-right rallies in the USA. On the other hand, you have some other bands who explore themes which could be likened to 19^th Century Romanticist music, who make records around the concepts of national-heroes or of times of national struggle, but who reject the far-right minority within the genre. To take Ukraine as an example, Drudkh, who have millions of streams on Spotify (Spotify was only expanded to Ukraine in late-July 2020, so the absolute majority of these have come from overseas listeners, which means it is easy to say that while still “underground”, they are one of the more popular Black metal bands in Europe), conceptualised their 2005 album around the 19^th Century poet Taras Shevchenko, and recent political history has only further encouraged their music to become Romanticist around Ukrainian national figures who opposed the historical inclusion of Ukraine in the Russian Empire. I suppose the question is, in rough general terms, “how does Black metal music lend itself to nationalism/anti-globalism in Eastern Europe?”

                        Apologies for the mini-essay, but I’ve been thinking about what I could do my project on for a while now and rambling could help. I also felt like I had to provide a reasonable amount of context given the niche nature of the subject. Hope anyone who made it to the end found this relatively interesting :).

During our discussion in week two I struggled with reconciling or understanding the parameters and definitions of ‘nation’ under which transnational history operates under. This weeks reading helped me understand the development of nations and why they exist he way they do, in particular in Sebastian Conrad’s book Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany. Conrad asserts that through their inspiration of the Grande Nation, western Europe transformed itself from a patchwork of minor states into a landscape of nations. The late nineteenth century was an era of worldwide interaction and exchange. It was generally assumed that nations developed into modern nation states, then they would gradually enter into contact with each other, begin to become international, and start to engage in global trade and world politics.

            “The family became the clan; a combination of clans become the state and the nations, and finally, the close links between nations developed into intersectionality,’ August Babel asserts. First the nation, then the interconnections: this is called the paradigm of consecutively, a odel of stages of global development. While the readings this week helped me with understanding the place ‘nation’ had in transnational history it is because I understood the creation of nation states. The model that Babel introduces is what was applied to the world, it is a western model. Nations do not and cannot all ‘develop’ or ‘progress’ in a linear and categorical way. It is the same as categorizing countries as ‘first world’ or ‘third world.’ You are making places adhere to a system that they did not create nor ideologically believe in or stand by. Why is one countries idea of development the correct one? Why are we working towards the ‘goal’ of a developed country modeled by the west? What would have happened if these communities had been given voices and autonomy to develop and advance their societies in whichever way they choose to even if its deemed as ‘under developed’ or ‘behind.’

            It is my belief that ‘nation’ in transnational history is there to break the ideas and conceptions of what a nation is. Looking at the ebbs and flows between different cultures. Looking at ‘internal nations’ if you will, we can track the ‘development’ and ‘advancement’ of nations outside of the prescribed theories we have been taught and exposed to throughout our academic life.

Reading Clare Anderson’s piece this week has inspired me to return to a novel which I began reading earlier this year: Peter Carey’s True history of the Kelly Gang. Having little knowledge of Irish-Australian history, it was not transnational motivations which inspired the selection of this book, rather it was the Booker prize it was awarded in 2001.

Having been told many times to stop reading novels when they are not enjoyable, I put the book down after managing to reach about the halfway point. I found the rhythm of colloquial language and ridiculously long run-on sentence styling tiresome to navigate, on top of the confusing narrative; Ned directly addressing the reader, who is his baby daughter reading his letters to her in the future. Having read Anderson’s article on convict transportation, however, I feel inspired to give Carey’s novel another go. 

Centring around Ned Kelly, an Australian murderer and member of the infamous Kelly Gang, the novel follows our protagonist from youth to the death of his Irish convict father, and his own execution in 1880. Though a work of fiction, Carey saw it his duty to explore his Australian heritage, writing an account which would expose the history of his home soil, and further the image of Ned Kelly as an Australian icon. Despite the wrongs he committed, Ned is revered, and was placed on centre stage at the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. He is seen as a champion of the oppressed, suffering at the hands of British Colonialism from birth, and forced to rebel as a reaction to a thoroughly corrupt justice system, police persecution, and continuous threat of eviction. 

The novel addresses the lives of the transported Irish convicts and their communities, while Ned’s narrative makes clear the difficulties of navigating this treacherous landscape;

“Your grandfather [Ned’s Irish convict father] were a quiet and secret man he had been ripped from his home in Tipperary and transported to the prisons of Van Diemen’s Land I do not know what was done to him he never spoke of it. When they had finished with their tortures they set him free and he crossed the sea to the colony of Victoria. He were by this time 30 yr. of age red headed and freckled with his eyes always slitted against the sun. My da had sworn an oath to evermore avoid the attentions of the law so when he saw the streets of Melbourne was crawling with policemen worse than flies he walked 28 mi. to the township of Donnybrook and then or soon thereafter he seen my mother. Ellen Quinn were 18 yr. old she were dark haired and slender the prettiest figure on a horse he ever saw but your grandma was like a snare laid out by God for Red Kelly. She were a Quinn and the police would never leave the Quinns alone.”

Peter Carey, True history of the Kelly Gang, (brisbane, 2000)

While Carey’s work does not explore in depth the transnational nature of convict transportation, it provides a personalised access to Ned’s family’s, and the families in their communities’, persecution, as they fight to avoid the authorities who are determined to convict them of one crime or another. The Irish are seen as merely, “a notch below the cattle” by colonial officials. Despite Ned’s father’s, and his own, attempts to avoid crime, they find that their place as Irishmen in Australia means they cannot escape the label of ‘criminal’. Hence we see Ned resort to crime as a means to rebel. 

While we might expect to have contempt towards Ned for the wrongs he commits, Carey uses him as a symbol for the rising up of the oppressed against their oppressors. Against his will, he is apprenticed to an outlaw, Harry Power, and as a boy he recognises the wrong in the crimes they commit. However, as he grows to understand the nature of his oppression, and the importance of countering it, despite the increasing malicious nature of his character, the audience cannot help by wish he survives. Kelly hopes that his gang has;

“showed the world what convict blood could do. We proved there were no taint we was of true bone blood and beauty born” 

Peter Carey, true history of the Kelly Gang, (brisbane, 2000).

When I read Anderson’s article, I was enthralled by the extraordinary rich picture painted of the network of transportation taking place in the 19th century, and the political and social motivations lurking behind the journeys and lives of the convicts. By focusing on individuals like George Morgan, or the few young women transported from Mauritius to the Australian colonies, Anderson was able to pick apart the relation between race and the broader identifications of religion, class, behaviour, and education. I hope that, by re-reading Carey’s work, and supplementing with historical material, I can gain a better picture of Irish community life in Australia, and its place as a fine thread in the large tapestry of racial, political, and social transnational interaction during colonial rule. 

Following the introduction to this module, the readings for this week’s tutorial have been very useful in witnessing transnational history ‘in action’. I had read in broader articles on transnational history about the significance of Sugata Bose’s work in the field and so it was a great insight to read a work that is widely revered by historians, setting the standard for the employment of methodological processes and perspectives in this discipline.

Bose’s focus on the circular migration of Indian labour provided an interesting perspective that was not specific to either migration or emigration, but on the wider effects of Indian labour movement throughout Asia. As Bose highlights, the historical precedence has been to centralise European and American capitalists within the process of economic globalisation, neglecting the multitude of Asian capitalists with global ambitions. The combination of evaluating both Indian labour movements and its place within the greater Indian Ocean area allows Bose to present a wholly rounded text that exemplifies the benefits of transnational history. This text has taught me how transnational history, unlike global history, does not require a perspective of the whole world, but rather a focus on the movements and connections of a particular subject across a selected area. The weaving together of Jewish mercantilism, the discovery of oil, the Japanese economic activities and Zanzibar’s clove trade is a perfect display of Bose’s understanding of the possibilities that transnational history allows.

Similarly, Clare Anderson’s use of the specific studies regarding penal activities within the British Empire to address the wider topic of race. Through examining the case study of George Morgan, Anderson presents a well-rounded interpretation of the issue of race within the British Empire in the early 19^th century. As Anderson shows, transnational history allows for the intricacies of a topic, such as the understanding of race, to be contextualised within a wider sphere so as to uncover the issue of generalisation and dependency on selected evidence.

Overall, this week’s readings have allowed me to understand how the theory of transnational history works within a historical text. Anderson and Bose exemplify the benefits of transnational practice through their use of local examples to present an evidential and rounded assessment of that topic in a wider context. Essentially, these key texts have given me the confidence to go off and create my own transnationally historical work without the over-complication of theoretical and historiographical focus.

The readings from this week really helped clarify to me the meaning of transnational history approaches in practice. Particularly, what that means for the role of the individual lived experience. Generally, using personal accounts in history can accent the narrative with detail and perspective otherwise missed on a grander scale. Both Boga and Conrad refer to individuals or use quotations from them in their respective chapters.

Using the individual as a rhetoric device or research tool is very effective in understanding the lived experience as opposed to a far-removed sometimes spectator-ish recounts of flows of migration and economic commerce. Boga uses personal examples from people who themselves migrated with the trade flows that he analyses.  By beginning each of his sections with a personal account from an individual, it made his spatial division of the Indian Ocean arena both more valid and easy to follow. Not to say that it otherwise would not have been valid, but rather that it made it more apparent why Boga was approaching them as three different systems of commerce with overlapping features rather than one grand narrative.

Boga comments on this himself, and the necessity of a balancing act between the personal accounts and the global data/approach to inform or depict transnational history. To overbalance one is to lose valuable and interesting insight. In his own writing, the balance was a mixture of first-hand accounts illustrating social and cultural elements following Indian migration with commerce, supported by statistical data of ownership and financial records. Whilst personally I find the financial statistics somewhat cumbersome, I would agree that it acted nicely as the thread to follow in a cohesive manner and added invaluable information of transnational trade routes that developed and how they were interlinked.

Conrad in his telling, used the individuals (and quotes from them) and what party they participated in to illustrate predominant attitudes towards Poles and Germanisation. For example, he quoted Alfred Hugenberg, who was a member of the Pan-German League, to show the attitude of political figure to illustrate the divisions and ethnic tensions that were prevalent. This was very effective, and to me a very interesting and colourful way of exploring transnational history without getting too involved in the details of the individual’s life.

Personally, I found these readings and the image of the individual in transnational history as a tool of rhetoric and as resource to be highly useful. Both in expanding my understanding of what transnational and global history is, and in different approaches to telling it and what I found most engaging. It has definitely clarified to me that my interests are in social and intellectual history, as I really enjoyed Boga’s insight into the tensions working Indian migrants faced in different regions, as well as the use of individual information by Conrad to illustrate the cultural/ethnic tensions rising around Prussian and Polish nationalism.

I also liked that the nation state became not the focus, but not removed either. I understand the desire to move away from the hegemony they hold over narratives in history and spatial borders imposed by that, however the role of national sentiments and the impact of those tensions is of critical interest to the flow of information, people and ideas in later centuries. Not to the detriment of other factors, but I feel it would be a mistake to avoid discussing a nation to the extent to pretend national identity sentiments and compulsions did not exist.

Where to start with this week’s readings? There was something just so exciting about the overturning of some teleological perceptions which we have about Empire. Firstly, George Morgan, what an absolute badass (except for the part where he stole from a street musician), and also what a fantastic illustration of race-formation. By looking at George Morgan’s story, we see the thought-process of those who were grappling with the question of “what is race?” in the 19^th Century. Before biological determinism had taken control of the debate, a man of a non-white ethnicity was able to convince a British judge to legally classify his “race” as “European”, not solely because he was a Christian, but because he could also present his argument and his character before the court in a “European” manner. What is fantastic about this article is that Clare Anderson is able to analyse a transnational actor’s history as an introduction to broader transnational forces, which the other two articles also do quite well. The transition which Anderson maps from George Morgan being able to convince Europeans that he is a European, while simultaneously taking pride in his allusions to Jim Crow, to the place in time where Jim Crow and blackface cabaret shows became an attempt at subjugation and race-formation and how this occurred on the periphery of Empire, with its origins being rooted in the economic and security concerns surrounding multicultural convict labour, is interesting. The homogeneities of “Empire” and “Imperial racism” are seen to be much more layered, with different mentalities surrounding both “Empire” and “race” resulting from the varying geographical locals, the targeted groups, and the oppressive group’s perceptions of these groups across the Empire. One question this article leaves me with is this: if the concept of race is constantly in flux, then at what point can we say that a mentality of racism in Empire became systematised enough that “race” becomes a “thing”?

                        The Sugata Bose article was my favourite for it potentially (if my definitions are anything to go by) provided the perfect argument for transnational approaches being more reflective of the historical reality than global approaches. When it comes to Empire, the typical line of analysis in global history is to analyse the relationship between the metropole and its colonial periphery. What this avoids, but Bose highlights, is that within a single Empire there may be multiple poles. The conquest of political sovereignty does not mean that a nation’s economic and cultural influence suddenly disappears transnationally. What Bose shows is that there were incredibly rich and deep transnational linkages across the entire Indian Ocean which were totally Indian and were formed fundamentally independent from British oversight. Indian financiers provided the capital to establish businesses on different continents, and these enterprises would bring Indian business culture overseas, as well as skilled labourers, well-connected merchants, and Indian communities and customs. It is a refreshing argument to read that perhaps British political control and economic manipulation did not completely sever the links which had formed across the Indian Ocean hundreds of years before the British ever arrived. However, this leads me to my question in regard to this reading: was the relative decline of Indian communities and capital on the rim of the Indian Ocean after independence due to nationalism in post-colonial states on the Ocean’s periphery, or was it also due to a reorganisation of Indian capital towards domestic issues once the British had left?

                        Finally, the Conrad article was another refreshing, albeit rather grim, re-evaluation of what “Empire” and “race” meant historically. Conrad traces some of the origins of anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic racism in Germany in the late-19^th/early-20^th Centuries and its rather worrying how non-mythical it was. Essentially, increased immigration from Eastern Europe worried some Germans, because they threatened their economic stability and also because they seemed to be more impoverished than their German counterparts. Correspondingly, it was believed that they were less clean and therefore threatened the physical wellbeing of Germans by simply existing in the same space since they were seen to bring disease. The discourse surrounding these two concerns (that Eastern European migrants were economic and health threats) found roots in earlier Teutonic discourse and worked circularly with new biological and global conceptions of race to present the “Pole” as a race to be feared by Germans. The question of whether there was actually anything of issue with “Polish culture” is answered by the fact that the central government routinely failed to construct a solid legal definition of what a “Pole” was and by the subsequent inability of border guards to then identify said “Poles”. The racism against Poles (and Jewish Eastern Europeans) arose because they were the transnational migrants who arrived, and worked, in Germany. It is unlikely that if the Ruthenians had been the first to work in Prussia, and not the Poles, that the Prussian landowners would have been happy with these workers. Instead, a similar process of racialisation may have occurred painting the migrant labourers as “bad” while other “races” would be classified as “allies” in the fight against this “bad race”, just as had occurred with the Poles. I suppose this article leaves me with lots of depressing questions regarding the origins of Nazi racial theory, but I should also focus on the historiography of the article: despite heavily using primary sources of German national political rhetoric, does the focus on international migration make this article “transnational” enough to make it a transnational history?

Apologies for the rather unattractive looking blocks of text, but just thought I’d try preparing a question regarding each reading going into this week, which subsequently involved me just doing a lil analysis of each article. I have a couple ideas floating about for essay titles so maybe I might explore that next week.

After doing the readings from week one and two I thought that the discipline of transnational history was starting to become a bit clearer. However, after doing this week’s readings (Conrad in particular) I’ve come to realise that whilst historians of transnational history (such as Bayly) have argued that the purpose of the discipline is to shift focus from the state centric approach to historiography, the nation state still has an important role to play. The seed of this idea was sown towards the end of last week’s seminar where Bernhard mentioned that a potential starting point of investigation could be in the ‘national’. This of course does depend on what you are aiming to investigate, but nevertheless the nation state can still be front and centre when using a transnational approach. 

Conrad’s chapters (and book for that matter) uses Germany as the focal point of his investigation. However, what makes it ‘transnational’ is the fact that he uses the example of German reactions to ‘Polonisation’ in comparison to German actions in their colonial settings, and the similarities and differences in their approaches at on the continent and in German colonies. What is striking to me is that Chapter 3 is quite ‘Eurocentric’ as its focus is on the movement of Polish seasonal workers into Germany. But, in a transnational context we see the other nationalities of workers that the German’s wanted to attract to replace the Polish, who they believed to be a threat to German culture. 

To some extent the Bose text also emphasises the links between India and the places such as the Middle East, East Africa and South East Asia. Thus, removing the prior assumption I had that nations had a limited role to play in transnational history. Of course, they must be used to enhance our study of transnational flows but are acceptable areas of investigation to the transnational historian. 

For me this is quite an exciting prospect regarding the potential directions I could take my project as being in a Scottish University I don’t often get the chance to study Welsh history and what better way than to put it in a transnational context. Recently, I watched a brief four-part BBC documentary on called ‘Wales and the History of the World’, and it sparked some ideas about where I could take my project. And I hope to use Wales as a starting point in planning my larger project. Whether my focus will be on a Welsh individual, an area, mobility of populations or something else is undecided but am looking forward to seeing where I end up. 

I’m interested to see what others thought about the readings and how they the think the role of the nation fits into transnational history. 

When reading our key texts last week, I was surprised to see how important individual people were to understanding transnational history.  The oxo article demonstrated the significance of individuals as connectors who connected places to allow the oxo brand to be a success throughout Europe.  Although, these individuals were from a more privileged class, the article on connected histories of empire and especially, this week’s reading on George Morgan, gave a more in depth look into the lives of those from varied backgrounds, which cut across the boundaries of class, gender, religion, culture and education.   

I found the Morgan article in particular very interesting, through its diversity of individuals that cut across these boundaries.  It also demonstrated connections not just of Britain and the colonies, but also intercolonial transportation of convicts.  The article gives a great deal of information on how different cultures were treated in very distinct ways, how each of the colonies also had its variations and the individuals that connected them.  We see a change in social identities for many with the changing of their name to Anglican names such as John and William.  Some also converted and were baptized, whilst others learned English.  I wonder if this was to allow them to be treated more like Europeans, which in turn, may have changed the colonial authorities minds and allow them to have a more sympathetic view towards the convicts.  Clare Anderson stated in her article that “‘Europeanness’ was clearly a question of religion, education, association, ‘habits’ and ‘manners’, and not simply birthplace or colour”, which she believed many of the colonial authorities stood by.[1]  I would agree that many individuals such as Morgan were treated differently due to this, not the first time around, but the second time around when he was able to make a plea for his case.

This article was very interesting and I look forward to delving deeper into the module to see how lives and cultures are shaped, not just by actors, but also through commodities and ideas.   

[1] Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives. Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790-1920 (Cambridge, 2012) pp. 56-92, p. 68.

In his article ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’ S.J. Potter speaks of a ‘fruitful cross-fertilization’ that can be achieved between Imperial and Global histories in order to bring together Imperial histories ‘top-down’ approach and Global histories ‘bottom-up’ approach. He emphasizes that in order for this cross-fertilization to be successful historians need to employ new methods like ‘connected histories’ top get a complete picture. ‘Imperial historians should devote more attention to links within and between different Empires and within and between different colonies.’ Potter asserts this offers to associated benefits. It can help us correct the Anglophone bias that continues to mark much of supposedly ‘Global’ history—often, in fact, a dialogue among English-speaking historians, built on English-language parts of the world.

            Chris Bayly points out that beginning in the late 1960s, shifts in historical discourse emerged in response to concerns about ethnocentrism. Wendy Kozol furthers this point noting that critiques of U.S. and European imperialism and racism, as well as challenges to gender inequalities and heteronormativity, have also been extremely influential in the development of transnational history. Anticolonial and nationalist movements, along with feminist, civil rights, and LGBT movements, have compelled reconsiderations of how historians understand migrations, state formations, and globalization.

            Transnational histories rooting in breaking out of monolithic National or Imperial history and studying dialogues between a diverse set of factors is what most intrigues me about transnational history. It feels unbounded. Isabel Hofmeyr notes that ‘movements, flows, and circulations’ are defining characteristics of transnationalism. In my eyes, transnational history is studying inner intricacies, patterns, and seeming semantics on a global scale. By allowing ourselves to compare and learn from different entities around the world and how the work, or don’t, together seems like what history should be. We should be learning from each other and each others cultures, finding similarities or contrasting two countries, spaces, empires, or regions together give us an invaluable amount of educational wealth.

            Like how transnational feminist activist confront the limitations of global feminism and articulate social justice claims through their understanding of the inequalities between First and Third World women’s experiences and resources, I would like to do the same with postcolonial studies. Transnational feminist historians reexamine how processes and institutions such as colonization, modernization, and feminist movements have sustained critical divisions that have differentially privileged or harmed groups through gender, racial and/or sexual frameworks. Much of these critiques are what lay at the heart of postcolonial theory.

            The ‘Mestizaje Americano’ is one of the greatest cultural hybridizations that the world has ever seen and we can learn much from this through the lens transnational historians use. Why are people disinclined to identify as ‘Mestizo/a’? Are indigenous cultures being honored and protected? What racial frameworks evolved or were exploited out of the great mestizaje? How has Latin America accepted or rejected indigenous gender or sexual frameworks? Latin America is made up of some distinctly Spanish things, some distinctly Indigenous things, but most things present are an indivisible mixture of both. Looking at this from both a ‘top-down’ and a ‘bottom-down’ way, as Potter spoke of, and studying the movements of these people will shed light on the topic.