MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

One thing that has been on my mind this week, especially in the lead up to my presentation, is structure and how most effectively to convey the information I have. While this includes sorting, planning and rearranging, I also want to make sure I am clear in terms of concepts, definitions, and generally with the information I am using and conveying.

One aspect of this is in terms of language and uses of specific terms, which can sometimes be slightly confusing and misleading, including for me. Some scholars use ‘transnational’ and ‘international’ interchangeably when describing the nature of women’s organisations, despite the different meanings of these terms. This is compounded by the fact that many of the organisations had ‘international’ in their name, but were transnational in nature. Some, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, were quite clearly transnational, bringing women together to work on issues such as peace while overall disregarding national frameworks. Yet, those such as the International Council of Women had both transnational and international features. This includes being comprised of various national boards but facilitating transnational work, exchange and idea flows. While this can make it a bit confusing at times and slightly blur the lines, I am just trying to remember that it is these transnational aspects I am focusing on, and make this clear in my work.

I also think that I am going to adjust the title of my project. Initially, as I stated in my proposal, I was planning to go with ‘International Women’s Movements and Transnational Feminism: International Women’s Organisations in the Interwar Years’. However, much of my current argument focuses on the Eurocentricity of the main organisations, including in terms of locations, conferences, and where members came from. As Bernhard pointed out to me, by framing the period of study as the ‘interwar years’, I am further contributing to a Eurocentric discourse. Therefore, ‘the 1920s and 1930s’ seems more appropriate. I am also considering adjusting the first part of be more reflective of my emphasis on transnational rather than international aspects of international organisations. However, I feel I may be getting slightly bogged down with the terms at the moment, so I am yet to fully decide…

Finally, my research so far is overall going well. While there are limits to accessing certain primary sources such as some conference reports, I am finding alternatives, including newspapers, letters, and organisations’ publications to gain insight into such events and gatherings. I am excited to see what more I can still find and how it will continue to mould and shape my final project!

I have noticed that it is often when you think you have finally settled on a topic and an argument that you come across an article that invites you to rethink everything and broaden the scope and reach of your work. This is what just happened to me, for better or for worse.

Until now I was interested in the dissemination of climate anxieties in the French empire in the late 18^th century and, in a rather materialistic approach, was mostly focused on forest conservation programs and the impacts of El Nino events. But that was before I read Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher’s ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate : A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity’ (Critical Inquiry, 38:3 (2012)),, which, in seeking to historicise the concept of the Anthropocene, studies climate as an ‘epistemic category’ during the 18th century. I therefore immersed myself in an unsuspected and fascinating wealth of ideas, discovering climate theories dating back to the Antiquity and widely disseminated throughout the Western world until the end of the 18th century. Despite their diversity, one constant emerges: the belief in humanity’s ability to modify the climate and in the mutual influence existing between climatic conditions and levels of civilisation and health.

For most of us, the idea of the Anthropocene was born in the 21st century, as a result of recent and disturbing scientific discoveries that have revealed the destructive impacts of human activities on the environment, and in particular on climate. It also carries a narrative of gradual awakening to our environmental impacts, from a blind and unconscious industrialisation period to an unprecedented contemporary level of knowledge and consciousness.

In reality, our modern and globalised societies are only rediscovering with horror what was known from the Antiquity and until the end of the 18th century. Indeed, as Fressoz and Locher’s article suggests, human agency on climate and its potential negative impacts were, especially in the later part of the 18^th century, at the heart of Enlightenments’ political and social thought.

It is therefore surprising to note that, until today, the history of modernity over the last two centuries – and of its founding concepts such as capitalism, freedom, equality, progress, etc. – has been written, interpreted and analysed without taking into account an epistemic category that is now inevitable, namely the idea human societies have of the link between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’. This oversight stems from the fact that, since the beginning of the 19th century, the institutionalisation of academic disciplines has led to the separation of the fields of the natural sciences and the humanities and to the emergence of a nature/culture dichotomy at the expense of a more holistic framework.

Following the example of environmental historians seeking to bridge this nature/culture divide, it seems that a rereading of the foundations of modernity by exploring the ways in which climate as an epistemic category interacted with other structuring concepts such as colonialism, racism, equality, freedom…is necessary. Fressoz and Locher have initiated this movement by investigating the politicisation of the climate issue during the French Revolution.

The idea for my project would therefore be, instead of focusing as I had planned on Mauritius, Saint-Domingue and Paris in a transimperial perspective, to do a history of the mobilisation of climatic theories during the Transatlantic revolutions: The American revolution, the French Revolution and the Haitian revolution.

This will allow to explore the “afterlife” of climatic concepts dating from the Antiquity and mobilized during these revolutions and also, if I may say so, to reveal the “beforelife” of the Anthropocene concept. Indeed, the Anthropocene existed, at least conceptually, well before it was named in the year 2000.

Of course, rethinking my project in this way comes with a number of questions and difficulties. It means firstly that I should delve into the historiography of the Atlantic revolutions, which I am not very familiar with. I am also unsure of what to do with my idea of working on the impacts of El Nino events: I could maybe keep them as a global background to the circulation and politicisation of climatic theories, but that might just clutter up the project.

What does an image mean? That may seem like a broad question, fair enough, so I’ll narrow it down. What can the contents, or lack thereof, of an image mean? That’s a little more specific but still quite general I’ll admit. However, it hits at an important, in some ways multi-pronged, idea: that the examination of an image’s makeup is key, but that which is missing may also be of importance. 

So, to follow this thread line, let’s ask another, much more specific, question. What does the image of a grassy, rocky, hilly, lifeless landscape with a large monolithic head of rock mean? Well for one thing, it obviously has been moved there. There exists no mountain of which this head could have been carved from, and the stone looks quite different from the little juts of rock that lay scattered in the image. Another detail lay in its strange, elongated design, which with enough examination will expose the statues’ makeup to being that of a relatively full body and not solely a head. This combined will its seemingly buried nature and a lack of disturbance in the local grass will lead one to the rather obvious assumption that these heads, which any can find multiple distinct yet similarly framed images of with enough searching, are quite old. In all of this, however, I left out one fundamentally important factor. 

Why are they here? The absence of people in most of these photos might lead you to the quite fair assumption that these ancient statues, with their oh so strange designs, are that of a bygone age and people. The last monuments to departed civilization, waving at us from the millennia-gone past showing us just a piece of their splendor and culture. Except this assumption would be wrong. 

For despite the absence of people in these images the makers of these statues, which come in at mostly well under 700 years and old but by no means ancient coinciding with the Black Death in Europe, descendants still exist and live on this seemingly barren island inhabited in photography. These Rapanui, those who share the name with the island they inhabit, while forgotten are still trying to thrive in a world that both nearly killed them and now only remembers them through empty images of their monuments. This then can be what an image means: destruction. 

The last week has been a little challenging and I haven’t managed to do some of the work I had been planning to complete re. my research project and presentation. However, what I have realised is that locating material on some of the key actors in my project is going to be a nightmare.

Whist my initial ‘small’ essay surveyed the field of Global Legal History so that I could place my work within the context of what academics are currently writing and maybe pick up a methodological tip or two, the main project is more substantive, focussing on the drafters of an already overlooked 1868 treaty.

Whilst I was able to find a copy of the document, on which the drafters titles were recorded, finding out anything more about them has so far been an exercise in futility. Partially because they have not been labelled particularly significant by current history, to the point that I haven’t even been able to attach names to some titles.

These are not figures who have had books written about them and though some of them have penned newspaper articles to provide an indicator as to their views, the current scarcity of material which I am observing around them could be a problem. Not that that would be fatal for my project, I still have more than enough to write on considering my intent to tackle the intellectual history of the ‘Hauge law’, many books have been penned on this subject and 4500 words can make no claim to the lofty heights which others have already reached. Indeed, even scant material would make (in my opinion) a fascinating aside to a central argument.

However, as my project proposal suggested, the default to broad intellectual history feels like a bit of a cop out to me. I have a hunch that there are transnational connections of real substance hiding amongst those drafters which will explain why they (a military advisory group) were the first people to set down proscriptions on combat. If I can find sufficient material to do so, I feel like being able to jump between this little group and a transnational perspective would really increase the strength and quality of my project.

If the research task proves too hard within the allotted time I have, then I think it would probably be cognisant of me to have a backup local group, involved in the treaties framing or ratification, who I could track transnational connections between. Whilst I think there may be something to be said for advocacy groups, red cross chapters and government caucuses who favour legalising war as potential alternative topics of individual level research, I have no idea which one of these I would look to yet.

Wow! Turning in an assignment that I’ve worked on for a while is always slightly unnerving – is it really done? Have I looked at the page so many times that I didn’t notice a formatting mistake? Did I accidentally delete a footnote and am now going to get charged with plagiarism and academic misconduct?! Though it’s hard to let go of a paper when turning it in, I’m looking forward to moving ahead on the final project.

The short essay took the most amount of research I’ve ever done for a project. I checked out five books from the library (3 of which I had special ordered!) and read countless more online, along with journal articles, theses, and edited volumes. Thankfully, since my essay concentrated on historiography, I was able to focus on introductions in most of these books. Many of the scholars pointed out the history of their field and their aims to change the scholarship in the first few pages. It was so interesting to begin to notice cross-references between authors and realize the timeline of historiography.

My final essay topic was to survey historiographical developments in subaltern studies, postcolonial theory, and gender studies to understand developments in the comparative history of India and Ireland and encourage greater integration of women’s experiences into the master postcolonial narrative. This last part, exploring women’s experiences, was the most interesting to me and what I hope to take a deeper dive into during the project. I ended my research by reading ‘World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality’ by Merry Wiesner-Hanks and it was fascinating to learn that as both have made great strides in telling broader and more nuanced stories, world history and gender history have ignored one another and both fields lack intersectionality. I realized I had a misconception of transnational history, and other fields like postcolonial, subaltern, and gender history as being revolutionary and inclusive of one another’s advancements. In reality, it is easy to get hyperfocused on one’s specialty and forget to intersect disciplines, and even stay up to date with other fields.

Moving forward, Natalie Zemon Davis’ put it well that ‘the direct exchange among scholars across boundaries is one of the best paths to discovery in our globalized latter-day times’. I aim to take my research beyond its typical frame of reference to ensure I intersect paths. I am also beginning my research ASAP, as this project is twice as long as the essay, and I have more tabs open than can count!

From my short essay writing and post-project proposal reflection I have been deliberating the direction of my final project. A lack of direction has been my biggest issue, so I have been spending some time to figure out where I want to take it forward and have discovered interesting discourses I want to pursue for my project. My initial idea to research Czechoslovakia during the 1950s-80s and the transregional exchanges between the nation and the Global South was fairly broad and I struggled with how to narrow my focus. My interest in Czechoslovakia came from wanting to focus on states “peripheral” to the USSR during the Cold War, particularly due to the current climate and increased interest in Ukraine and its relationship to Russia. As such, I’ve become interested in a certain aspect I came across in my initial proposal – the civic petition, Charter 77, which described the lack of press freedom in Czechoslovakia as a “virtual apartheid” and criticised the government for failing to implement the human rights provisions of the documents it had signed. This use of “apartheid” got me interested in what role anti-apartheid activism played in shaping the ideas and language of human rights in Czechoslovakia from the 1950s-80s.  

Supporting and forming anti-apartheid movements were a key way for socialist states to connect to the South African liberation movements and Third World liberationism in general. Their engagement with this issue proved their solidarity as anti-imperial and anti-discriminatory states – in their eyes the opposite of Britain and the US who both had tricky histories with colonisation and race. It was interesting to see that the African National Congress (ANC) party, which was banned in 1960, sought to foster deeper connections with socialist bloc countries. A letter even exists in Czech archives from the ANC asking the Czechoslovak government to educate South Africa’s black secondary and university students following the University Education Act of 1959 which banned black South Africans from enrolling into open universities there.  

Therefore, I think it would be interesting to examine three interconnected strands: the support of the Czechoslovakian regime for anti-apartheid movements in South Africa and the alliances between the region and Africa in a host of international organisations (the UN, World Peace Council etc), the emergence of a transnationally formed human rights rhetoric based on these alliances and its impact domestically, and the emergence of dissidence movements in Czechoslovakia which fought their corner using much of this same rhetoric to claim a shared solidarity with apartheid atrocities and highlight the hypocrisy of their government.   

I think there is a lot of interesting intersections to be found here – between national and global/’universal’ ideas of human rights and how they entangled with Cold War events (the Prague Spring for example) or superseded Cold War divisions, between international projections and domestic realities of human rights, between Cold War studies and post-colonial studies, between race and human rights etc.  

Scholarship does exist in this area, and some great studies have been done into the history of anti-apartheid worldwide (Betts et al., A Global History of Anti-Apartheid) as well as the formation of ideas of human rights (Richardson-Little et al., New Perspectives on Socialism and Human Rights in East Central Europe). Though some research has been done on how anti-apartheid movements were engaged with in Hungary, the GDR and Poland, none have engaged specifically with Czechoslovakia, even though the nation has a rich history of involvement with both anti-apartheid movements and the formation of a world-wide human rights language, therefore I’m looking forward to looking into it further.  

Last week’s class on the non-human was extremely interesting. For me, it helped clear up some ideas I have for my long essay, and allowed me to adapt what I was saying in my short essay. It showed me that I was viewing the human and the environment as separate “beings” or “objects” in some sort of dichotomy, and that this view was problematic. Humans are part of the environment, they impact the environment, they are catalysts for change and react to that change. Humans cannot exist without the environment, so why do we view them almost in opposition to them both in life and history?

This is why, in my long essay, although my focus is on social movements in the twentieth century, I am not going to consider these social people as separate from the environment, but rather as campaigning for something they are a part of. This can help me better understand why collective opinions formed, as I will remember that these same humans are part of the same environment. 

Furthermore, after doing research for my short essay, I have decided that I will place more focus on micro historical and anthropological methods than historical environmental. The short essay was a useful exercise because it allowed me to study different approaches to environmental history, and I can apply the concepts I have learned to my long essay, but I am not sure everything was completely relevant to my question. Of course, that is the beauty of the preliminary essay, because if I dived into the long essay first thinking I was going to use environmental historical methods I would have hit a roadblock which is not fun!

My plans at the moment and for the future are to continue reading primary and secondary sources for my essay and map what I find onto a timeline and a map of Europe, to understand the socio-political context a bit better to answer the question Why did environmental social movements develop similarly in Eastern and Western Europe?

‘International Law’ (IL) is useless. Or so goes the conventional wisdom.

Whether sitting around with all the armchair generals in IR, reading ‘realist’ literature or indulging in the latest journalistic diatribe against IL penned by some jumped up American isolationist, you cannot escape this inevitable conclusion. Of course, certain good hearted Liberal institutionalists and anti-war activists have tried to make the case for IL in public opinion and within the academy, but their attempts appear to be largely seen as quaint and naïve. The myriad of terrible illegalities which have accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has worsened this trend.

Considering my obvious distaste for some of the current attacks on IL, it may come as a somewhat of a surprise that I used to be a relatively fierce critic of the efficacy of IL, as some of my early essays illustrate. What may be more of a surprise is that I still question whether IL can function as an effective restraint on states in the present day.

Reading legal history and legalist activism for my short essay has taught me that IL is not some free floating ‘thing’. Like all social and legal constructions, it is a product of its context, constantly reproduced. As such, attacks on the ability of IL to constrain states seem misguided to me.  A more intellectually honest take would be to take aim at the context surrounding IL, which allows states and individuals to violate it. In simpler terms, focussing not on the fact IL has been broken, but why that ‘break’ occurred.

Some models claim they can do this. The most common default is to draw upon ‘rational actor theories’, with some modifications for lack of information, bureaucracy and psychology in a crisis. However, what may satisfy policymakers does not satisfy historians (as my recent exploration of law office history has illustrated to me). Even my initial reading for my project has shown that rationality is not a sufficient model to explain why IL is broken or obeyed historically (though it remains an important and valid analytical tool). The perspective that IL is useless beyond its utility to a rational actor, cannot explain the massive upswing in demands for the ‘legalisation of war’ and the balancing of humanitarian concerns against military efficacy which occurred during the drafting of the St. Petersburg Declaration. More importantly, it fails to explain why states largely obeyed these rules, even when there was no imperative to do so. It’s not like we suddenly got ‘more rational’ in the modern era.

Whilst this hypothesis will undoubtably be outside the bounds of my 4000-word project, these observations have made me interested in looking at how intellectual contexts affect the violation of IL. Whilst I can make no evidentiary claims, perhaps, were critics of IL to move beyond their present context to examine the origins of ‘realism’ in the work of Carl Schmidt, and how the laws of war initially formed alongside a transnational intellectual web of legalists and humanitarians, they might conclude that the problem is not IL, but the intellectual context in which it currently sits. This is a controversial thesis to be sure, but perhaps one worth exploring, maybe in a dissertation or something of that kind.

With the presentation a week or so away, I am enjoying continuing my research for my project. What is currently on my mind is how 10 minutes to present really is not that much time. From my research so far, I already have a lot I could talk about. How do I best utilise that time? What aspects do I include? What do I omit?

I know that I definitely want to include some visual aspects in my presentation. I have already found some interesting images of international women’s organisations, including one of some of the participants of the All-Asian Women’s Conference in Lahore in 1931. However, the image is not of the best quality, and I am unable to see individual faces. Therefore, rather than trying to perhaps figure out any key figures, I am trying to think of how I could still use the image and draw information from it. It makes me think back to the Esperanto workshop, when we studied various images of Esperanto speakers and thought of what we could gain from them. Maybe I can find some information through, for example, looking at their clothes, the number of women, or where the photo was taken? Such images could therefore provide some insights about the conference and type of women involved more generally in these transnational networks in addition to information found in written sources.

In terms of visual sources, I also want to try and utilise some maps. In particular, marking where women in particular organisations came from, and where they convened. I think a visual aspect to this information could be particularly beneficial in demonstrating the Eurocentricity of organisations that supposedly represented ‘all women of the world’. I am , however, not too sure how to best do this, as it is not something I have done before. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to figuring it out, and also researching and finding some more visual material to use in my presentation. I think it is a great opportunity to discuss and show this added analysis on top of the written work I will include in my essay.

“Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)”. So goes the title of one of the many articles I am reading in my attempt to better understand Rapanui and its people. This one specifically details how soil samples indicate that the previously supposed population decline experienced by the Rapanui people did not actually occur to any severe degree. Such a detail lends credence to the theory that the European influence on Rapanui was much more substantial to causing population decline rather than the pre-contact decisions and actions of the Rapanui people themselves. A key piece of making any sort of said argument than can rely on this article. 

Said geology-based article, written by a collection of scientists for biology-oriented Nature Communications peer-reviewed journal, contains numerous pieces of technical language and data that, due to my sole studies in the field of history, lay beyond my field of understanding. These writings at the same time make up a large percentage of the sources written on Rapanui, as the historical dialogue is matched if not surpassed by the scientific one. This then, initially, stood as one of my principal concerns on this project as I was worried many sources would be lost to me due to lack of expertise. 

As it turns out this problem, much to my pleasant surprise, is not actually such. The availability of this internet has allowed me to parce out any words beyond my understanding to at least a reasonable degree of comprehension, and the language of the articles I’ve so far read, while not quite common English, are nowhere near as technical as I first feared. This issue is thus a barrier and challenge yes, but not an insurmountable one. 

Why then bring this all up? If my issue has been resolved what worth is there in trying to discuss it. To me, and I hope this doesn’t come off as preachy or overbearing, the answer is advice. It’s my comment, now gained from personal experience, that one should not share my initial deeper fear of non-historical sources as a usable tool. These pieces can be deeply valuable in expanding one’s scope and granting even more evidence to the argument one is making. In addition to this they can add new insights and arguments that were previously unavailable from a purely historical viewing. If this was already self-evident to you, I admire you and can say I am now happily in the boat, but for those like me who were hesitant please hop in: the water’s (or soil in this instance) is fine. 

I have been engaging with more theoretical discourses regarding the construct of ‘the nation’ along with its main counterparts, nationalism and national identity. The fluidity of the term across disciplines, particularly international relations, has proven to be a bit difficult to navigate as I conduct my research. The postmodernist aspect of my project does not help to simplify these issues either. Although, revisiting Mary Fulbrook’s Historical Theory has been quite helpful in grounding myself in a fundamental understanding of historical agents, sources, structures and outlooks in wider historiographical contexts; it is quite comforting to acknowledge that the historian has no way of avoiding a specific conceptual category of analysis (Fulbrook, p. 80). By recognizing the artificial construction of terminology dominant in historical writing, a more informed deconstruction and understanding of ‘the nation’ as a historical phenomenon is allowed. I have thoroughly enjoyed Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism as it engages with different approaches to the term ‘nation’, particularly delineating the relationship between nationalism and national identity. I had previously not considered the implications of an a priori and a posteriori perspective of nation-building, which now leads me to question how deeply I should go into researching discourse regarding national consciousness in Belarus and Ukraine. Hobsbawm’s book exemplifies the unreliability of attributing nationalism as the driving force or precursor of ‘nation’ through the collapse of the Soviet Union, as nationalism was a beneficiary of the establishment of the states – not the instigator. 

 My short essays focus on the methodological issues related to ‘the nation’ as a unit of analysis in transnational history has helped to indicate some of the broader historiographical issues associated with the nation-state and nationalism. I have gained a greater appreciation for the transnational perspective as it does aim to mitigate some of the gaps prevalent in the historical tradition of ‘the nation’. Interacting with different scales addresses the requirement of analysing the nation from ‘below’ in order to understand its construction from ‘above’. 

In regards to the postmodernist historiographical aspect of my project, much of the scholarship on ‘the nation’ I have read for my short essay ties in nicely with some of the facets of postmodernism I am working with. Although, I am a bit daunted by the language aspect as I am realizing I will be dissecting a discourse (what is ‘nation’) within an even more complex discourse (what is ‘language’). I am particularly interested to see how the postmodernist historiography of power structures plays into terminology such as ethnicity and nationality and its application in Ukrainian and Belarusian scholarship. 

There is a clear link between non-human and transnational history as looking at the non-human cuts across many of the categories which humans impose, such as the nation which form the basis for narrow studies of history. There is a long tradition of studying geographical features, and areas in history and transnational history is often based on networks which operate across these such as trade networks in a particular ocean. Environmental history has led to studies of what Andreas Malm calls climate in history which look at the impact on human history of climate events. An example of this is the case of the description of the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland. Such studies fit in to transnational history because their effects are felt across borders. Similar to the aims of other forms of transnational history the approach interrogates existing chronologies by using a different narrative centred on a non-human event and by creating the sense of simultaneous time across boundaries. It also challenges narratives based on centre and periphery which are built on human power structures. An alternative centre and periphery could be suggested by the immediate geographical impact and the wider impact as in the case of the Laki volcano with its lava flows and ash cloud. Andreas Malm refers to another type of history: history in climate. This would ask questions about how humanity has impacted climate and when this process began. Malm suggests this approach is of interest because one could investigate alternatives routes not taken that would not have led to a climate crisis and one could apportion blame and suggest motivation for the process which led to the crisis. Jason Moore’s articles also focus on the processes which caused the crisis, but rather than focussing on the use of fossil fuels as Malm does he highlights the importance of the early modern period of European expansion and suggests capitalocene as an alternative term to Anthropocene which better captures the origins of the crisis: specifically in the capitalist system rather than the vague reference to human responsibility.

I took John Clarke’s History of Environmentalism module last year. We read a few interesting pieces that I found to be relevant to this week in Transnational history. Sophie made an interesting point regarding how easy it is to forget that the ways in which we visualise the borders and landscape of various nations are constructed. This point reminded me of a few fascinating concepts I learned about last year in John’s module. After the Revolutionary War, the United States was desperate to culturally define itself in contrast to its European counterparts. Romantic images of wilderness and vast terrains were spread by novelists, poets, painters, and explorers during the early years of America’s independence. There was an almost frantic effort to label themselves as the nation with unmolested, virgin land. Nature and the vast expanse of wilderness was that focal point. Wilderness, therefore, became the centre of literary and artistic expression.

Conservationism, preservationism, and the current environmentalist movement all have their foundations to some extent in the maintenance of America’s natural grandeur – the wilderness that served as America’s first cultural identifier. I only ever approached this thought from a settler-colonial theoretical perspective—American national identity grew at the expense of indigenous history, culture, and identity erasure. I never thought about this piece from a transnational perspective as I have only written about wilderness in the context of North America. It is interesting to look at ‘wilderness’ in terms of boundaries and the international definition of self. The United States created the concept of ‘wilderness’ (a place devoid of human touch) to separate itself from Europe. Europe had thousands of years of artists, poets, and other magnificent cultural traditions that young America could not emulate. They, therefore, used ‘wilderness’ to separate themselves from the rest of the Western world and give themselves a cultural background previously non-existent. The concept of ‘wilderness’ has played a huge role in my dissertation and honours studies since John’s class and it is very interesting to look at it from a transnational perspective now.

This week’s readings were extremely interesting and surprising to me in a few ways. In terms of the draft article, I was surprised that I had never heard of Laki considering last year, while on a study abroad placement in Oslo, Norway, I took an environmental history class (with Prof Dominik Collet, who’s actually cited in the article) but I do not recall it ever being mentioned. Even being in a region Laki is supposedly more known in, it was never a name I heard mentioned… However, the way in which this chapter dealt with the interdisciplinary aspects of climate and culture was extremely interesting as reminded me of Prof Collet’s work on famine and the Little Ice Age and understanding human-environment interactions particularly be blending so called ‘archives of nature’ and ‘archives of man.’ 

The transnational lens in which the article took was also extremely interesting to me, particularly because it got me thinking a lot about borders and boundaries, and how easy it is sometimes to forget about the fact that nations and the way we visualise the world is completely man made. The idea that nature, and in this case sulfuric ash, is completely unaware and undeterred by these boundaries was an interesting thought, particularly when at times it can feel like it truly is the age of the Anthropocene. Laki and its wide encompassing impacts forced scientists and geologists and astrologists to become aware of what was happening in other parts of the world. It’s funny how inward facing we can be as societies until something seemingly inexplicable happens.  

To be honest, this article, particularly its final sentiments on the reporting of climatic events happening in other parts of the world, reminded me a lot of the early days of the pandemic when news was subsumed in trying to understand the new virus, how it had begun to impact people in more and more places and how we endeavoured to jointly connect the dots to what was happening and what potential solutions or mitigating procedures could look like.  

The Maim article on the other hand gave a very different perspective on environment and history. To me, it focused a lot on how we play the historical ’blame game’ when weighing responsibility in terms of the current climate crisis. In particular, he made an interesting argument regarding how colonialism ties into climate and environment and how this entanglement has caused conflict when considering which countries should bear more of the burden in solving the perils of climate change. In a way, it reminded me a lot of readings I had done on famines in India and to what extent the British empire can be blamed for their disastrous effects (Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts is a great book to check out for this). Is it fair to expect countries like India, who were only dragged into becoming coal dependent societies by British imperialism, to listen to the very same people who now tell them to turn to renewable resources? Is it fair for Western countries to ask developing countries to stop using fossil fuels to industrialise, when they have had years more to exploit these sources for their benefit, even if we now know better? It’s certainly a challenging conundrum – indeed though climate seems to be a transnational connector, it is also capable of dividing us, particularly when development and modernity are at stake.  

I find this week’s topic and readings extremely interesting because of the questions it raises about the practice of doing history and what counts as history. While I had heard of environmental history, and fondly remember reading (I think) some of the works listed in Andreas Malm’s 2017 blogpost ‘Who lit this fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy’ such as Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century on the Little Ice Age in MO1008, I was unaware of how extensive the field of non-human history is. I do remember the tone that Malm critiques this work for in how this study of the Little Ice Age makes the climate change we face today seem normal, almost inevitable. This blog post is careful to specify that there is nothing accidental about the current climate change situation and that it is instead the fault of humans in the last two centuries. I was fascinated to learn how empire contributed to this climate crisis, specifically the British Empire in India or the Soviet Union. 

In Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor’s ‘‘More-Than-Human Histories’ from 2020, I was first struck by the number of terms they employ: more-than-human approach, environmental humanities, multispecies studies, co-constitution. Additionally, there is such a diversity of fields that connect to more-than-human histories as the article talks about academics that classify themselves as ecofeminists, multispecies ethnography, Marxist geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists. This terminology and the focus on seeing all environments as cultural and natural hybrids, overcoming the privileging of some worlds and lives over others, and ridding of conceptual divisions of human life versus other life forms made me think about how absurd this article might sound to a traditional eighty-year-old national historian. Maybe it’s just me, but I am always happy to read articles that make me feel like I haven’t thought about things enough. I am glad we are exposed to such a breadth of ideas about the future of history as I think it’s important for us as students to understand that there is always space for more evolution of historical thought. 

In both articles, I was not surprised by the immense pressure put on historians to explain the past in a way that positively influences the future. I feel like this is a common thread in histories that focus on phenomena that hurt people or other things. In Malm’s, he specifically writes that in a warming world the central task of climate historians is to study history-in-climate rather than climate-in-history as this can lead to exit strategies and solutions. Similarly, O’Gorman and Gaynor’s article gives an example of the power of using non-traditional historical sources in the evaluation of the non-human: “historians might also use sources like whale ear wax, which registers signs of stress like whaling and climate change, to reconsider these histories from the perspective of the whales while also attending to changing scientific interests and questions” (727). By demonstrating the detrimental histories of something like whaling from this non-human perspective, she argues that this could change the future ethical engagement of humans with non-human worlds. Overall, I really enjoyed the reading from this week and how it forced me to expand my definition of “history.”