MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

These readings and their exploration of citizenship and immigration were not only interesting and also made me reflect on the current discussions concerning immigration. I was drawn to Camiscioli’s argument in particular. She argues that the French immigration policy was fundamentally a bio-political project driven by a ‘demographic crisis’ and ‘pronatalist’ anxieties, where immigrants were evaluated as ‘reproductive value’ rather than just labor power. Most of the literature and political debates now seem to be on the opposite, with countries such as France and the UK aiming to supposedly ‘protect’ the ‘biology’ of their countries. She continues, highlighting how this ‘assimilation’ inevitably bled into a sterilization project, moving the act of reproduction from the private sphere to the public in order for its ‘development’. The irony, as Camiscioli points out, is that the state desperately wanted these foreigners to assimilate, yet they simultaneously feared that the very process of “assimilation” would lead the second generation to adopt the same ‘voluntary sterility’ seen in the French population.

Reinecke, however, when looking at British migration policies from the 1800’s-1900’s highlights its restrictive nature to protect the countries industrial development. Reinecke claims that before this period, the British state was largely indifferent to the movement of people and that it was only with the rise of more burocracy that concerns shifted. We see this manifest in Britain through the “Coloured Alien Seamen Order” of 1925, which weaponized the lack of documentation to strip British subjects of their rights, effectively importing racialized colonial hierarchies into the domestic sphere.

These readings were interesting and helped me see the historical echo’s that brought todays political climate regarding biology, citizenship and migration. With political parties such as Reform UK on the rise I am seeing similar rhetoric and phrases which Camiscioli highlights across her text. Is there a way forward, away from these harmful views? Or is this a historical cycle repeating itself?

Writing my short essay on the wider methodological approaches to interwar statelessness, and to an extent statelessness in general, provided me a great many insights on the best method of approaching my project on the White Russian diaspora. One particularly valuable aspect was of course my realisation, or at least the discovery of my belief, that any one approach to statelessness, transnational, supranational, or comparative, each carries inherent flaws that make them ill-suited to a non-supplemented usage.

When reading the historiography I discovered a clear and present disparity between ambition and reality in relation to the universalist ambitions of supranational and international organisations and the material reality on the ground. This confirmed my previous suspicions on the matter that a purely supranational approach to the White Russian diaspora would be wholly inadequate. For such an approach would gloss over problems, such as what migratory freedom the Nansen passport, which both the French and Chinese government recognised, truly granted the diasporic communities within their newfound jurisdictions. Which neighbouring countries also recognised the passport? Did individual border control agents or administrations perhaps refuse to recognise the passport, despite the official policy of their nation? A purely supranational approach would fail to properly address these questions. An accompanying transnational lens would also allow me to cover the international activist-led organisations that agitated for the better treatment of these refugees, and the migratory patterns, if any, that existed within these two diasporas. For instance, did they grow and contract in size along a similar scale? It also became clear how easy it was to fall into the trap of reinventing the assumptions of so-called ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that nation-states are the default unit for analysing social issues. This ‘reification’ would most likely have come from a project solely rooted in, or overly weighted towards, a comparative approach, wherein I would approach the White Russian diaspora through a purely bilateral ‘host’ vs ‘home’ lens, when what could be classified as ‘home’ for many amongst the diaspora did not exist anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.

Overall, the short essay proved to me that my project on the White Russian diaspora requires a synthesised approach of all three methodologies discussed previously. This synthesis has pushed me to firmly adopt a combinatory method of analysis moving forward with my project on White Russian communities in Paris and Shanghai. The Nansen passport will serve as a supranational entry point, whose implementation, or lack thereof, can be analysed comparatively to investigate how it was locally adapted, contested, or outright ignored under dissimilar structural conditions. Finally, émigré-produced sources and infrastructure can be utilised transnationally to partially bypass the flaws inherent to applying an overly ‘from above’ approach to the project.

Working on the short essay provided me with significant insight into the direction I want to take my broader project. One of the most valuable aspects of the process was engaging directly with Comanche Nation documents, particularly those relating to membership and consultation in national projects, and comparing these to international frameworks such as United Nations definitions of indigeneity.

This comparison revealed a striking imbalance. While global institutions like the UN position themselves as authorities in defining indigeneity, they often do so through frameworks that emphasize marginalization and historical subordination. In contrast, Indigenous-led documents foreground governance, procedural integrity, and active political participation. Seeing these side by side made it clear that indigeneity is not just being described differently it is being constructed differently depending on who is doing the defining.

Interestingly, when discussing my project with classmates and friends, many were familiar with major international organisations like the UN, but far fewer were aware of Indigenous-run institutions or governance structures. This gap in awareness mirrors the imbalance I encountered in the research itself. Prior to this project, I also had limited exposure to these Indigenous-led frameworks, which further highlights how dominant narratives shape both academic and public understanding.

This has pushed me to more explicitly centre the question of agency in my project: who gets to define indigeneity on the global stage? Is it large international organisations, or Indigenous nations themselves? Moving forward, I want to dedicate a section of my project to this tension, drawing more heavily on Indigenous-authored sources, community documentation, and, if possible, interviews. This will allow me to ground my analysis more firmly in Indigenous perspectives rather than relying predominantly on external interpretations.

Hello Rosie! Your proposal offers an interesting perspective on the Cold War, Eastern Europe and the collapse of the USSR which I am eager to read more about. Your focus on cultural transnational exchanges and how they interacted in Eastern Europe with political contexts through the example of rock music is particularly interesting. 

I enjoyed the nuanced approach you’re taking, by studying how both individuals but also states gave meaning and tried to mobilize rock music in different ways and contexts. It resonated a lot with the content of Fidelis’ Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain : Youth and the Global sixties in Poland, which we had the opportunity to explore during the book speed dating session. In this book, she highlighted how communist states and in this case Poland, were directly involved in the opening of their societies to western culture although it was highly regulated but also reappropriated and pushed further by individuals. I look forward to seeing how you will explore those ambivalent movements as well as how rock music and the imaginary associated with it was instrumentalized but also constructed differently depending on the actors and the context. 

I feel like your project is also a great opportunity to explore individual testimonies and practice micro history, notably by highlighting the meaning individuals gave to rock music and how those individual meanings sometimes participated in community-building and notably the creation of transnational communities, but also how they were shaped and interacted with socio-cultural contexts.

As I am not entirely familiar with the subject, I was also wondering if cultural exchanges regarding rock music only involved exchanges between western countries and eastern European countries or if there were also exchanges with other non-western countries since Fidelis in her book mentions how a cultural imaginary was also built around “global south” countries and notes forms of cultural exchanges. It might be interesting to look into it. 

Overall your proposal is really clear and well-thought and I look forward to hearing more about your findings in your presentation!

Having received feedback from my project proposal, and the conference presentation and final essay nearing closer, I thought I would take this reading week to build upon my project, analyse my feedback, and begin to delve into more detail on the project. Furthermore, with my short essay serving as a wider literature review on race and sport, I feel I now have a better understanding of the field, and how it has developed, and can build this into my project, within the frame of race and golf.

Firstly, whilst it was outlined with my project, I feel I can now confidently some up my project argument within a sentence:

The racial issues withing golf have changed over time, and while figures like Tiger Woods have impacted the image of golf on a transnational scale, deeper, entrenched class and racial barriers still exist, and continue to shape access to the sport.

Being able to condense my argument like this will prove valuable for the conference presentation, due to its time limited nature, and provides a clear and concise roadmap for those reading or hearing about my project. Beyond this, I have narrowed down my key topics to speak on in the presentation. These include:

• my condensed argument (above)
• The context of golf and exclusion
• Woods as a breakthrough figure, and his transnational effect (impacts and limitations)
• Junior golf and wider structural racial issues
• Evidence that golf has changed more in image yet less in structure

Thus, from this I have given myself key areas to read up on further to help construct my conference presentation. These include Golfs exclusionary history, Tiger woods and representation and how the media framed his impacts, and structure and access within golf – like Junior golf, participation, cost barriers and club culture. If I can narrow down key texts and scholarly views on these key areas, this will help analyse the changing nature of racial issues within the game of golf.

Building on the feedback from my proposal, my comments said that there was a risk of this becoming a ‘love affair’ between myself and Mr Woods. However, the comments said I had made an effort to analyse the topic through an analytical lens. As Mr Woods has already had his fair share of affairs, I want to continue this and not let my personal connection to golf take over. Thus, as my project continues, I will constantly try to step back and ensure that I am analysing the issues of race and golf as a historian, not as a golfer.

irstly, I would like to say that this reads as a very interesting project proposal. It is not a topic I can personally say I have heard of before, and thus I am intrigued into how this final essay, or project, will shape up. Furthermore I enjoy the knowledge displayed of the pundits and their techniques, even if only explained briefly due to the nature of this short proposal. Is this something you will look to explore further in your full project? I feel it would be interesting to shed light on the creation methods, and analyse their use, in both the context of the exploration of Indian Pundits, and the context of global exploration. Beyond this, it would be interesting to explore how this integration of techniques from the pundits challenges Ideas of science being purely European.

You acknowledge how you will be challenged by engaging with competing with the European and Indian interpretations of the Pundits. This is a good point – and do you feel you could struggle to find a balance of material from both perspectives, to create an effective judgement?

Your Primary sources, particularly those from the Pundits’ diary entries seem highly valuable. These will, and clearly already have, provide a level of personal insights into the pundits lives, and explorations in ways that some primary sources, produced for the masses, may struggle to uncover. Thus if used effectively, and acknowledged for personal biases, I feel you could uncover some key personal insights for the project.

Your final point is one that stuck with me. The overlooked nature of these Indian pundits is a classic theme of British Imperialism – do you plan to look into themes of post-colonialism and issues like the lack of representation within the Royal Geographical society? It seems clear that the pundits were not marginal figures in the history of Himalayan exploration, but central to it, and thus they should be remembered as the figures of transnational exploration and global knowledge that they were.

I am looking forward to seeing how your project unfolds – best of luck.

This project presents an intriguing topic and nuanced approach by combining a transnational lens with an intersectional lens. By taking a transnational perspective to the study of second wave feminism, this project appears to be filling an important gap in the historiography of this subject which has typically focused on feminism within specific nations. This proposal also highlights the important distinction between first wave and second wave feminism, as both, upon further study, possess different characteristics in terms of political focus and methods of activism. This comparison has, as mentioned in the proposal, become a dominant method of analysis in scholarship regarding second wave feminism. Therefore, distinguishing this wave in isolation and in the proper context seems vital. The historiographical context given in this proposal thus provides a strong understanding of the topic, as well as points to the gaps which the project seeks to fill. 

Exploring the circulation of ideas, or lack thereof, during this period of feminism across borders introduces a fascinating point of argument in this project, one that I have never personally encountered. I also like how the project de-centers a Eurocentric framework and works to include transnational networks between non-Western countries too. The proposal also states how it will implement an intersectional perspective on this subject, by examining how second wave feminism interacted with other social issues and political movements. This is a historiographical focus I have seen in the past and one that I find becomes increasingly popular due to its relevancy and depth of understanding. This is particularly done through analyzing the intersection between gender and race. Through including this, I believe this project will contribute effectively to this important line of research, while also revealing the transnationalism present within this area. 

Overall, this project proposal presents a compelling case of analysis as it brings together both intersectionality and the role of transnational networks and underpinnings, both of which were integral to second wave feminism and to understanding it better as a movement. 

The events of 1968 are often remembered as a global moment of protest, where ideas, tactics and solidarities travelled across borders. Yet examining these movements more closely reveals a more complex picture, one in which transnational connections were both enabling and deeply constrained. By compring Fidelis’ study of Poland and Davis’ analysis of Spain, it becomes clear that while activists engaged with global imaginaries and networks, their ability to translate this into tangible political success remained limited. At the same time, historians today may be attributing a form of agency that was not fully realised in the moment itself.

Fidelis’ article on Poland challenges traditional narratives of march 1968 by placing student protests within the framework of the ‘global sixties.’ Rather than viewing Polish student protests simply as dissdents opposing a repressive regime, she presents them as participants in a broader transnational left. These students engaged with global ideas (drawing on anti-imperialist struggles such as Vietnam and invoking figures like Castro) to articulate their critiques of both Soviet domination and global power strucutres. However, these connections were often more rhetorical than practical. Polish activists operated within a system that severely restricted international exchange, meaning that their engagement with the ‘Third World’ functioned largely as a symbolic language rather than a basis for sustained collaboration.

This liimitaiton was further stressed by the state itself. The communist regime appropriated transnational discourse, especially anti-imperialism, and redeployed it to undermine the protests. By framing students as foreign-influenced ‘Zionists’ or agents of imperialism, the state weaponised the same global imaginaries that the student wanted to mobilise. In this sense, Polish activists did not suceed in translating their transnational engagement into political transformaiton. Instead, their movement was violently suppressed and its global language turned against them.

Contrastingly, Davis’ article on Spain presents a more sustained and embedded form of transnational activism. Focusing on local movements in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Davis demonstrates how activists actively integrated Third World imaginaries into their political practice. Rather than merely referencing global struggles, Spanish activists built networks that connected local issues, such as urban inequality and authoritarian repression, to broader anti-imperialist and revolutionary frameworks. Progressive Catholic figures, for instance, drew on latin American liberation theology, while radical leftists adopted models inspired by movements in Algeria, Cuba and beyond.

These cases show that transnational connections are real but uneven. In Spain, activists embedded global ideas into local movements and sustained them over time, though often through imagined rather than direct links to the ‘Third World.’ In Poland, students were far less successful, as their protests were crushed and their transnational language was turned against them by the state.

This raises a broader question. As highlighted by Clavin, transnational history highlights flows and connections, but can risk overstating how coherent or effective they actually were. In both Poland and Spain, activists clearly saw themselves as part of a wider global struggle. They exercised agency through imagination and engagement with global ideas, but their ability to act as truly effective transnational actors was limited by repression, weak networks, and Cold War structrues.

So did they succeed? In immediate political terms, not really, but if success means contributing to a wider transnational political culture, their actions matter in a different way. What did not fully work at the time is, in hindsight, understood as part of a broader global history, one in which agency is nnot only exercised, but also reconstructed.

While it may be somewhat unfair to comment on this proposal as we were previously paired up to analyse each-others work, on second reading and with more time to reflect I have come to appreciate its contribution much more fully. What stands out immediately is obviously its focus on and questioning of the ‘Blitz spirit’ as a powerful but potentially overly homogenising framework. Its goal of asking how exactly Jewish Londoner’s experiences of this ‘resilience’ may have differed from that broader story is a very interesting one. From my understanding the project is an examination of whether Jewish resilience during the Blitz was shaped by factors such as entrenched antisemitism, communal networks, and cultural practices, rather than simply a part of a homogenous ‘British’ cultural monolith.

The proposal also makes a strong historiographical intervention by questioning how far the traditional narrative of the Blitz has obscured the experiences of minority communities. The so-called ‘stiff upper lip’ that is often a stereotype of pre-21^st century British culture is I believe the main motivating factor behind the blanketing of a ‘Blitz spirit’ across class, ethnic, and social lines. By foregrounding Jewish Londoners, particularly in the East End, the project seems well positioned to show that resilience was not a uniform culture-blind experience, but was instead one shaped by, and perhaps gated behind, the perceived integration, or lack thereof, of existing communal structures. This places the topic in a significant spot not just within Blitz historiography, but also for broader discussions of how national wartime narratives, organic and deliberately imposed, can flatten the true experiences of marginalised groups.

The proposed range of sources is also a source of strength. Any approach to such a topic would obviously require primary sources in the form of Jewish-led newspapers, testimonies, diaries, and others, with their usage providing a rich foundation for examining both communal and individual experiences. I also think the combination of spatial, social, and transnational approaches is a good one, as it neatly neutralises the inherent problem of such a project where it must remain rooted in the London East End while still connecting this localised experience to the larger context of World War Two. As I spoke about previously I believe the Battle of Cable Street, while coming before the Blitz, is a must-tackle subject when approaching the topic of the East London Jewish community. Cable Street was and remains a kind of foundational myth for the anti-fascist movement and Jewish community in London and Britain as a whole. It may therefore help illuminate some of the roots of the resilience identified in the proposal that relied on both formal community organisation and everyday acts of survival.

Overall, this is a strong proposal with a clear research question, an important intervention, and an broad yet deep base for its sources. Its focus on Jewish Londoners has the potential to make a meaningful contribution by showing the uneven distribution of Blitz resilience across social and ethnic lines, and by offering a more nuanced understanding of wartime London than the traditional culturally homogenising ‘Blitz spirit’ narrative.

The topic selected for your project is a very interesting and under-explored one in recent historiography despite the intense grip The Troubles held over the British and Western public consciousness. What stands out is of course its emphasis of the transnational framework through which Ulster Unionism must be analysed, such an approach feels entirely absent from the public view of The Troubles, in comparison to the Republican side whose connections to things such as the Irish diaspora in America are a far more well-known fact. From my understanding, the project asks how Ulster unionists cultivated international support and legitimacy during the Troubles, and how their rhetoric and public outreach were deliberately adapted for non-Ulsterite audiences.

Your explicit contrast between the uneven application of transnational history to Republicanism and Ulster Unionism shows that you yourself are not unaware of the historical niche your chosen topic sits within. I also think the proposal is particularly strong in challenging the long-standing assumption of Unionism as a parochial, internationally-reclusive movement by investigating the very real attempts made by its proponents to achieve a similar scale of international support as was achieved by Irish Republicans.

The proposed source base is another real strength, a topic such as this thrives off of primary sources: speeches, pamphlets, advertising campaigns, political appearances and tours make the sheer breadth of available sources almost endless. Ulster: The Facts is particularly useful because it points to the kind of source that could reveal how unionists consciously fashioned their message for foreign audiences. The inclusion of murals as a possible source is also very interesting, I must admit I would not have thought to them at all. One possible further method of analysis could be to engage more explicitly with historiographical shifts in the study of Ulster Unionism as an ideology, such as how scholars have extrapolated its political language and relationship into the modern day. This might help more firmly situate the project within existing debates about Ulster Unionism and Unionism in general and simultaneously reinforce the significance and necessity of a transnational approach to the topic.

Overall, this is a very strong proposal that identifies a clear historiographical gap and proposes a valuable analysis of it utilising an impressive range of sources. Its emphasis on rhetoric, persuasion, and international image-making gives it the potential to make an important contribution to the study of the Troubles and to transnational Ulsterite history.

“Tensions of Transnationalism” by Malgorzata Fidelis was a valuable piece to consider the global influence on the formation of global movements and the gradual prominence of nationalism in legitimizing arguments against the state. Fidelis did a great job of managing multiple scales in this work, as not only do they contrast the difference of the student movements in the 60s in Poland compared to other European countries, but they also emphasize the differences between the elite youth who imagined themselves as a part of a global struggle compared to the rural populations who depicted the dissatisfaction with the state through nationalist images and arguments. I appreciated their consideration of local differences, as it was helpful to understand how people within a territorially bounded space (even if the social sciences portray them as culturally resonant) can share common concerns about their country, yet, due to their personal experiences, interact with and express these concerns in different ways. As such, Presthold’s definition of the transnational imagination and people framing local circumstances within a global historical trajectory in a manner that shapes collective desires was a useful term to add to my toolbelt. In general, I have found that reading works that problematize transnational communication rather than understanding these interactions as solely positive and empowering, as other scholars have portrayed them, has been fruitful to my understanding of the transnational perspective, especially by helping me understand their strengths and differences.

It was very insightful for my own work, reading about how different actors and parties handled this balance between the global and the national and how that shaped future discourses, especially as Poland shifted to utilizing nationalism to legitimize their claims after the state violently squashed youth protest movements and began an anti-semitic campaign that emphasized “proper” belonging to the nation based on ethnic groups and a rejection of cosmopolitan culture and incorrect forms of internationalism. In a way, this shift echoes how the right in my research essay simultaneously promotes nationalism while shaping their ideology through international communication, as their own use of global networks is deemed proper because it does not challenge the sanctity and loyalty of their respective states.

The overlap of this back-and-forth struggle in Poland is interesting when considering my own project on political movements on the right, as both Fiedelis and I study political movements that comment on the role of the state and the importance (or lack thereof) of the nation in a rapidly globalizing world. Fidelis’s focus on examining the way contemporary actors understood and articulated their feelings about a rapidly interconnecting world to interpret local events is quite resonant with my own work. Furthermore, similar to Fidelis, I also attempt to showcase the entanglement between transnational connections/networks and articulations of nationalism.

The focus of this week’s reading on Prussia is something really interesting to reflect on. When we think of eighteenth-century maritime economy and colonial ventures, it is usually Britain, France, and Spain that strike as the most prominent actors, with Prussia relatively marginalised, if not straightly ignored. On top of this, as both Schui and Struck mentioned in their writing, the common perception of Prussian political economy as inflexible and “dogmatically mercantilist” further discouraged historians from thinking about Prussian presence and ambition beyond Central Europe. And it is precisely this assumption that has been very well challenged by readings. Schui’s article on the 1750 establishment of the Prussian Asiatic Trade Company showed that, even though the project was to be deemed a failure, the notions of Prussian segregation from maritime economy as well as its inflexible economic policies are to be revised. The company, in fact, was a genuine bid “to increase the participation in oceanic commerce rather than an attempt to limit it” and was perceived as a genuine menace by other powers such as Britain and the Netherlands, worrying that Prussia might rise to become a prominent maritime power. Far from settling with a manufacture-centred, rural economy isolated from commercial ventures, even if the company had not survived the turbulence of the Seven Years’ War, with the impotence of Prussian naval power a crucial factor, its failure had not erased the concern with maritime trade from the minds of Prussian rulers. As Struck has shown, Prussia framed the 1772 Partition of Poland as far more than gaining lands to bridge East and West Prussia — the annexed Polish-Lithuanian territories were very much seen as an immediate colony, only that there was no Atlantic to cross or hurricanes to be weathered. One letter written by Frederick II in 1775, where he described these lands as Prussia’s Canada, directly betrayed this colonial paradigm by which they conceptualised the annexation. Therefore, Prussia had very much envisioned and made the attempt to develop a more sophisticated economy with an eye on overseas trade — and, indeed, the contemporaries were also sure that they had the potential to achieve this.

The reading also tackled the aforementioned conventional wisdom from another dimension — namely the historiographical compartmentalisation between East-Central Europe and the Atlantic. As Steffen and Weber had shown, despite their geographical distance from a maritime economy, the Central European textile industry was very much connected with not only the North Sea but also the broader colonial market. Lusatia was joined with Hamburg through the Elbe, while Silesia was connected with North Sea trade through a canal linking the Spree and the Oder. Remarkably, as the reading had pointed out, there was a deep favour for Central European linen in African and American colonial markets, with them taking up as much as two-thirds of British linen exports in the early eighteenth century. Struck in his essay on the 1772 Partition of Poland also brought under the light the Atlantic context of this annexation which took place in East Europe. Apart from the aforementioned Prussian ambition in breaking into the maritime trade market, the economic and political disruption from colonial investment failures by other major imperial powers (e.g. France and Kourou, Spain and Havana) was a major factor why Poland was hung out to dry in the event, with her call for support receiving few responses across Europe. Hence, there is a very legitimate need for us to reincorporate East-Central Europe into the history of the Atlantic, and perhaps also our conceptual understanding of the history of globalisation in general.

I love how strong and thought out this proposal is, especially with the mapping of the historiography before moving into your own intervention. The explanation describing the shift from nationally bounded studies of second wave feminism to more transnational approaches is super effective! I like how “Third World feminism’s” role is highlighted in recentering Western narratives. That alone already shows a clear awareness of how the field might’ve changed, which also makes the project feel very well grounded.

I believe one of the biggest strengths of the proposal is the focus on circulation, and especially the absence of it. This is a really productive angle and one that connects well to everything we’ve been discussing and learning in class about transnational history—not just about connections, but also about the limits, barriers, and uneven exchanges. This also carries into this week’s readings and how they’re pushing us to think about hidden or somewhat uneven networks, where ideas and influence don’t have as much freedom to travel as we might assume. This project is positioned in a way that gives it the ability to explore those kinds of tensions within feminist movements.

The incorporation of intersectionality is additionally a major strength. The point about how some feminist movements reproduced other forms of exclusion is incredibly important and something that adds a crucial layer within the project that prevents it from becoming too celebratory or overly unified. This fits nicely with the broader argument that there wasn’t a single second wave, but rather sometimes conflicting “mini” waves.

In terms of additional development to think about, one thing could be the scope and specificity. Currently, the project is very ambitious in terms of geography (Western and non-Western contexts) and themes (circulation, absence, intersectionality, etc.). It could help to consider narrowing to a few case studies, networks, or specific exchanges that could be analyzed more in depth. This would, in turn, make the primary sources, such as journals and conference papers, even more focused and effective for the project.

Related to that, it could be useful to clarify what “absence of circulation” means in this context. Is it more about political barriers, language differences, or unequal power dynamics? I think defining this more clearly will help even further strengthen the core argument.

Overall, this is a very compelling proposal that I believe holds much importance! It’s historiographically aware, methodologically ambitious, and very obviously engaged meaningfully with the transnational approaches we have discussed. Awesome job! Super excited to read the finished project 🙂