MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid., p. 74.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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