MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

When I opened the course handbook last week, I was glad see that the readings for our eighth tutorial really coincided well with my ongoing research. The aim of my project is to recreate and study the often-overlooked knowledge trading networks that existed between French and British scientists in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and until now I had been unaware of the quite specific approaches used by transnational historians to study agents and processes of cross-cultural transfer. Each of the key readings set for the week provided very useful methodological framing devices for my topic. 

The most valuable, in terms of my focus, was described in the article provided by Lux and Cook. The ‘weak tie’ approach to studying scientific networks that they advocated brought my attention to the importance of devoting more research to connections between less visible French and British botanists in the Antilles. The works of sociologists like Granovetter and Latour (to which I was previously ignorant) seem to fit neatly with the aims of my project: they hypothesized that scientific knowledge might circulate more effectively between individuals who are relatively less attached to formal institutions of knowledge cultivation. In sum, that ‘individuals with many weak ties’ to these institutions could be, and could have been, ‘best placed’ to diffuse new scientific discoveries. Thus far my research on Caribbean botany has been driven by a focus on ‘elite’ cultivators of knowledge who were stationed at state-sponsored institutions of science. My exposure to sociological theories of scientific networking has since however brought my attention to extending the scope of my reading to interconnections between relatively less elite cultivators of knowledge in the eighteenth-century; supervisors of private rather than public gardens in Jamaica and Saint Domingue for example. 

But I also took some very useful conceptual perspectives from Secord’s work on what he termed ‘knowledge in transit’. His idea of scientific information as a medium of cross-cultural communication stood out and made me think more about what might be describe quite literally as the science of diplomacy: the way in which eighteenth-century intellectuals in the Caribbean cultivated and selectively diffused the botanical knowledge they held in order to forge cross-cultural connections between Britain and France at the colonial periphery. Certainly, thinking about botanists in this light might strengthen my hypothesis that scientists in the eighteenth-century could serve a dual function as informal envoys and formal cultivators of useful knowledge. Frontier diplomacy between France and Britain in the Antilles might well have relied more on botanists than has traditionally been assumed.

I have a bit of a problem with Secord’s criticism of Sobel and hero narratives in science. First I should disclose that my mother is a scientist and a grew up around a lot of scientists. In fact my mom is an astrophysicist and knows Sobel. I’m not including any of this background info in order to brag, I just want to disclose both my personal knowledge and my bias. When I read Secord’s article as at home back in Boston. I commented to my mom as I was reading the article, “so this guy seems to have a real problem with Dava Sobel.” She asked why, I told her that I’d tell her later and I went back to the article. I think the main issue I had with the article as a whole is that it seemed to extoll the pursuit of historiographical perfection above all other goals in telling the history of science. The reason I have a problem with this is that history of science is something that should be understandable and interesting to the public, and also to scientists. My mom is a well educated person, but she learned the word historiography because her daughter is a history student. Most of the engagement a lot of her colleagues seem to have with the history of science is books by the likes of Dava Sobel. I’ve actually seen books like this have a concrete positive impact on the way scientists approach their own field’s culture and history. The conference rooms at my mom’s office are going to renamed after prominent astronomers at the university many of them women, because of Dava Sobel’s book The Glass Universe.

I’ve seen dinner table conversation among scientists shift to history, because of books by authors like Dava Sobel and Walter Isaacson. Do both these authors tend to have possibly oversimplified hero narratives in their work? Probably. But does that matter more than the power of their work to get scientists talking about the history of their field? I personally don’t think so.

I should mention that when I discussed the criticism Secord had of Sobel’s specific work on Harrison and Longitude, my mother agreed that Sobel had left out too many of the contributions of members of the Royal Society. However for her Sobel’s book had still been a valuable introduction to the topic and a compelling read although it was incomplete.

I also think that certain trends in historiography around science can be especially alienating to scientists. The idea that scientific ideas do not spread because they are true can make scientists dismissive of “those wacky humanities people”. Personally I don’t think that scientific ideas spread purely because they are true, but the truth of scientific ideas is a factor in both how they spread and how long they last. My mother made what I think is a good point, which is that science is constantly checking itself, and that a wrong idea is likely to disproven and dismissed by the scientific community eventually. While cultural factors around science should not be ignored treating scientific ideas as as cultural and un-objective as say literary ones takes this concept too far and creates an intellectual chasm between those doing science and those studying its history and culture.

Most scientists I’ve met in my life are naturally curious people who want to learn about their field and other fields, but many of them find academic history just as jargon laden and confusing as most historians would find a paper on neuropharmacology. My view is that history unlike science does not work if it is not understood and appreciated by those outside the field. Your doctor can still help you if you don’t understand the procedure, but the history of science will not help scientists better understand how their culture and networks could be influencing their work if they don’t understand what the historians are saying.

I’m aware that this is turning into a bit of a rant, so I will close with some things I liked in the history science elements of this week’s readings.

I liked the idea of travel as creating networks of information exchange. I’ve personally benefitted from this in semi symbiotic way. I get to go places to learn about history (as well as other subjects), because my mom is going their to strengthen her networks of scientific communication.

I thought the discussion of “simple men” being used as witnesses for science was interesting and was something I had not come across in history readings before. Even though I had not encountered this idea in readings before I have encountered it in reality. In fact for much of my life I have been the “simple man” for my mom and some of her colleagues, especially when I was a kid. I think both historians and scientists might benefit from employing more “simple man” techniques. Perhaps not “simple man”, but at the very least “person who isn’t directly in my field”. I think that explaining an idea to a person who is not an expert on that idea or the theory surrounding it, is a good way to test the truth and usefulness of an idea.

Short Essay title: To what extent has the study of visual culture enriched our understanding of ‘imperial history’?

As I’ve previously mentioned on these blogs, whilst I have never been particularly artistic, ‘art’ or ‘visual culture’ have always fascinated me as a window to how a certain time or place would have looked or felt like. In spite of this I have always been more comfortable with words. When presented with the option between ‘a project’ and an essay, I will hands down pick the essay every time. Furthermore – somewhat hypocritically – in the hierarchy of primary source material in my head, I would always place a textual source ‘above’ a visual source. Up until now, visual sources have only ever served to illustrate to me as evidence, a point raised by a textual source. So, before undertaking this Short Essay assignment, I found myself in this curious position where I was about to examine mostly visual sources for my Miss World project and yet still regarded them as accessories to textual sources.  

And apparently I’m not alone. Edward Said, who has done so much to inspire the analysis of visual regimes as part of the postcolonial project, once said he found himself “somewhat tongue-tied” when he had to talk about the realm of the visual.[1] Even looking back at my St Andrew’s historical career, I struggled to remember the few times when we were asked to analyse visual materials as primary sources. Why was this the case? If indeed the study of history is meant to help us understand the present, then how is it we have largely neglected this central part of our everyday lives?  

The more I researched for this essay, the more it became shockingly clear how visual our culture really is. According to David Ciarlo, “advertisements were seen by far more Germans than any colonialist’s talk on tropical hygiene or any museum’s painstaking ethnographic construction”.[2] This made me consider, for example, the quantity of advertisements I see on a daily basis; how many movies I’d seen this year; how often I used Google Maps; even how often I see the Queen’s face on a coin. Although I realise that we now live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by visual media, what really struck me was how frequent these encounters were and how little attention we pay to them. Studying visual culture opens us up to analysing new cross-sections of society, which may have previously been ignored and it is in analysing what these people saw that we might be able to discern how they saw.[3]  

However, the difficulty still lies in bridging these two together – the source and ones interpretation of it. Scholars are still grappling with the epistemological challenges of a ‘linguistic turn’ that called into question the meaning of words and language, so to challenge the limitations of images is going to raise even more questions than it answers.

Furthermore from my reading, if one thing is clear it is that we cannot apply the same tools of textual analysis to examine visual sources. Whilst scholars debated the methods of analysis themselves, they were all in agreement that the power of the visual lies in its disorder – that images capture something words can’t. It is precisely in the disorder of the visual that we are required to ask whether there are in fact elements of human experience that we cannot express in words.

It is in dealing with this existential crisis that I began to take visual culture more seriously and realised the monumental task that I have in front of me. I’ve never studied art history so I’m not too sure what they would think of my amateur visual analysis techniques or my infringement into ‘their’ discipline, especially if I’m likely to consciously or unconsciously borrow from my textual analysis techniques. I am treading on very unfamiliar terrain when I look at video reels and photographs and if Edward Said isn’t really sure what to do here, how on earth am I supposed to?

[1] Mitchell, W.J.T, ‘The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Bové A. Paul (Durham, 2000), p. 31. 

[2] David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany, (Harvard, 2011), p. 13. 

[3] Ibid., p. 17 

Over spring break, I travelled to Amsterdam and Malaga, Spain with a childhood friend. Amsterdam is one of the cultural capitals of Western Europe and had a prolific art scene throughout its history. I didn’t know much about Malaga before I arrived but I soon learned that while it is primarily a beach and party town, it also prides itself as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. Malaga is home to a significant collection of his work and other prominent Spanish artists. As I toured museums in both cities, I was struck by the international reach of some contemporary art movements. Among movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism, it was the Dadaist movement in particular surprised me with its worldwide reach.

Dadaism originated with a collection of artists in Zurich who fled from the horrors of World War I. After the armistice of 1918, many of the artists returned to their home countries and founded their own Dada movements. Dada quickly spread to Berlin and New York and within a few years could be seen throughout Europe and by the late 1920s even Japan. Dada made its name by challenging the basic norms of society and the existing conceptions of what could be defined as art. Its rejection of societal norms found followers and ready contributors from all over the world. The word ‘dada’ itself was used for its multilingual and completely ambiguous meaning. In French it means ‘hobby horse’, in German ‘get off my back’ and in Romanian it is simply a variant of ‘yes’ or ‘indeed’.

In Berlin, the Dada movement focused on hypocrisy within politics and the plight of ordinary people as a result of war. Both the Berlin and Zurich Dadaists constructed manifestos outlining the aims and values of Dada artists. The New York Dada movement was much less literary than its European counterpart and focused more directly on the world of aesthetic art. Led by European transplants like Marcel Duchamp, New York Dadaists sought to undermine what was deemed as conventional art through irony. Duchamp and others in the New York scene took everyday objects and submitted them to exhibitionists. The most famous of these everyday objects-turned-artwork was Duchamp’s Fountain, an upward facing urinal. In each respective Dada movement, many of the artists, already international transplants, led transitory lives and never rooted themselves in one place. Dada movements formed and split up sporadically through the 1920s but the fundamental ideas of the movement largely remained and inspired avant-garde artists throughout the world.

After the popularisation of Dada in major cultural centres, the ideologies of the movement attracted artists in France, The Netherlands, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Russia and Japan. Each of these movements shared an aversion for anti-establishment art and politics. They tied themselves to one another through abstract art aimed at fighting conservative and traditional values. Despite the worldwide attraction of Dadaism, the movement did not maintain a coherent collection of artists long enough to form a comprehensive global alliance between its followers. Although, perhaps that was the very essence of Dada. They despised the mainstream and the conventional; creating an established school of art would mean becoming what they stood against.

Two weeks ago, spring break was upon us at last: time to visit family, take a well-deserved break… and squeeze in as much reading as is humanly possible.

Feeling rebellious, and drawn by my own long-neglected bookshelves, I decided that I would also take time over these sixteen days to read something that I wanted to read, without purpose, whose pages I wouldn’t be tempted to pepper with post-it notes. Something entirely unrelated to any of my modules, something fiction, maybe even something I had already read before. The point, I had decided, was to read just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

I skimmed my options, knowing them well enough not to need the bookshop connoisseur’s characteristic right-angled squint. Things that I had studied in English Literature I quickly skipped over, knowing that these would not help me on my mission to go post-it-free for a book or three. I narrowed it down a little further and arrived at this list.

• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
• The Secret River, Kate Grenville
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
• The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel
• The Book of Dust, vol I: La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith
• The Witchfinder’s Sister, Beth Underdown
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Exactly half of them I had read before. Three of them I had only read the blurb or first few pages in the five or ten minutes it had taken me to form an attachment in a charity shop. Two of them I had actively tracked across the Book Depository for several weeks. In any case, I knew enough about each of them that reading down that list came with a realisation that my task was going to be harder than I thought…

Because the interesting thing is, all but one of the titles I had chosen could be treated, in some way, as historical fiction. And, if the writers of fiction were as concerned with categories as we historians, then all but two or three could arguably fall into the category of transnational historical fiction.

From the story of early nineteenth-century London convict sentenced to transportation to New South Wales to a ‘transatlantic comic saga’ exploring the convictions and uncertainties possessed by a mixed-race British-American family living in the twenty-first century United States; from the story of an African slave who, like so many real individuals, chanced a dangerous escape from her situation in Georgia by way of the ‘Underground Railroad’, in this novel curiously represented in physical form, to an equally imaginative retelling of the diverse lives, cultures, and journeys of the Biblical wives and daughter of Jacob and their migration with his sons from Canaan to Egypt.

Yet even in the most dubious in the ‘transnational’ category, Beth Underdown’s unsettling take on the life and work of the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, in mid-seventeenth century Essex (which touches sinisterly though rather briefly on the transatlantic legacy of the Essex witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts) I realised that there was going to be no easy escape from historical thinking. For despite Underdown’s chosen perspective, a fictional sister who, like the community around her, too late begins to realise the terrifying nature of her brother’s work, hers is the most staunchly historical of the lot: fronting each chapter with genuine records kept by Hopkins and his associates, touching upon a number of real trials and characters, and closing her book with an explicit statement on exactly what in the novel is known to be fact, what historians, like herself, have speculated (for example, about Hopkins’ psychology), and what she, as an author, invented for the purposes of the story.

Suffice to say, in the end, I abandoned my quest and accepted that it was probably a good thing to realise that my personal interests align so closely with my academic ones this year. But it did bring me back to a question that I remember from our second-year historiography module on the relationship between microhistory and historical fiction. Is one simply a poor imitation of the other? What makes a good work in either genre? Should we ever allow for the lines to be blurred in ways that are not made explicit, unlike the careful separation in Underdown’s novel?

I recall a tutorial on hagiography in Late Antiquity from a mediaeval history module in first year, and I am personally inclined to say that we should avoid a revival of feigned authenticity, especially since our age seems less and less able to distinguish between truth and invention.

But then again, are we merely unused to doing that footwork? Or, perhaps, are we only unused to doing it for certain media? I should think that most people, when they pick up a book, will be more aware— or at least more wary —of whether it is fiction, non-fiction, or some genre that lies in between (historical fiction, speculative fiction, theory, political forecasting etc.) than when they open an article shared on Facebook, simply because we are used to trusting and distrusting books selectively.

Whether it is the reader’s or the writer’s task to disentangle fact and fiction is, of course, a debate for the ages. Naturally, historians are required to be more careful when it comes to imagination, and more explicit in their navigations between the known and the uncertain or the speculative. But rather than eschew the great unknown in favour of histories told in charts and databases, I believe that process starts with remembering the importance of imagination within our discipline.

History, it might even be argued, can only be an imaginative way of seeing the past, since our points of access are otherwise confined to a finite pool of sources which often produce many and variable meanings anyway. Hence, rather than deride microhistories as works of whimsical insignificance as was implied by that old question from HI2001, I would argue that we should instead congratulate them, for the recognition that, often, it is through small things, unique experiences, and ordinary eyes that we can best imagine a world.  

Thus far into my project, I am still wrapped up with the philosophical implications of identity.

While taking a break from the oh so exciting preamble of the EU, I did my weekly philosophy reading. This week’s topic is focused around aesthetic judgements and implicit biases. Once I had finished Hume’s famous Of the Standard of Taste essay, I was faced with a predicament. Hume is absolutely correct to point out these underlying biases all humans harbour. I think these biases at times, cloud our view of ourselves and the world around us. Really milking the philosophy student cliche, but I am wondering whether our general perception of reality is merely just one of a generated bias. Is there even a standard reality? Or, as I skeptically think, we all just live in our own separate realities. This relates to my project in the sense that identity is merely just how one perceives themselves, and attempts to convince others to see them in the same light. For example, my family is incredibly Eastern European. Though they have embraced the ‘American Dream’ in all senses of the expression, they still feel Hungarian and have strong (sometimes annoyingly strong) views about the political culture of Hungary. For example, my Bubbie (grandmother in Yiddish) HATES JFK. She accuses him of killing  boats of Hungarian refugees attempting to come to the States. Instead of letting the boats come into the country, JFK turned them back, ultimately in my Bubbie’s eyes, killing all of those Jews who were forced to return to occupied Hungary. Moreover, while others see JFK as a hero, pulling the U.S back onto its feet, my Bubbie sides with Hungary, harbouring a bias against any other political decisions JFK would go on to make. In this sense, she lives in her own reality, prioritising the safety of Hungarian Jews like herself over internal advances within the U.S. In this way, it seems individuals like my Bubbie hold transnational biases. What I mean by this is even though my Bubbie only has an American passport and has lived in the states her whole life, her Hungarian traditions and the language they spoke in the house influence her to be more sympathetic to Hungary. Her kinship to her country and origins is merely worn outwardly by labeling herself as “Hungarian.” In this respect identity is merely equivalent to wearing your bias as a name-tag for the world to see, acknowledge, and hopefully, respect.

My point is, identity is socially constructed. This seems obvious but I’m understanding it has a deeper meaning. For example, in terms of the EU, many European policies have been unfairly isolating the East. Countries like Hungary who have a track record of economic upsets and political instability are compared to a yardstick of successful Western countries such as France and Germany. Holding these biases against people, countries, and regions, I would cling to my conclusion that there is no wholly successful “European Identity.” While the concept itself might serve as a tool of unity and solidarity, closer investigation will only strain these connections. For example, A Hungarian like my Bubbie might consider themselves “European” but for different reasons than for which a French person would consider themselves “European.” While the French might cling to cultural similarities like literature, philosophy, and music, Hungary has historically been so isolated from these factors that they cannot relate. For Hungarians, or at least for my Bubbie, being European is not necessarily about this idea of solidarity or conjoined policies, but more the idea of liberation and freedom and protection of human rights. Breaking from Communist rule, many Hungarians are fearful to give over power and control to governmental institutions considering past history. The social benefits and human rights protections are what motivate much of Eastern Europe to consider themselves Europeans.

So I still hold to my cliche philosophical question: Is identity merely just the name tagging of biases?

In the week since the infamous St Patrick’s Day celebrations, I have become increasingly intrigued by the transnational, if not global, appeal of the Irish celebration. Each year it arrives in mid-March St. Patrick’s Day sparks a sense of joy, excitement and dare I say patriotic feeling in me, despite the fact that I myself have no Irish blood (as far as I know of).

This seems the case for many people around the world who, without a familial or personal lineage rooted in Ireland, feel connected to the customs and traditions associated with the Irish holiday. I wondered why this was, how far the origins of the celebration had a role in its current transnationalism and why it has this transnational appeal which seemingly surpasses that of any other national holiday.

The original roots of the celebration might give us some indication of its relevance beyond national borders. Saint Patrick himself was not Irish by birth and was allegedly born in Britain in the fifth century A.D. to an aristocratic Christian family. He immigrated to Ireland with a mission to convert the Irish to Christianity after he had been captured as a slave to pirates for six years. Thus, for many Irish people the day remained a primarily religious and private celebration even into the latter half of the 20^th century, with it only being declared a public holiday in Ireland in 1904.

In fact, the modern version of the holiday as a public celebration is largely an American export, as Cronin and Adair show (Cronin & Adair, 2002). The first recorded celebrations were held in Boston in 1737, where a group of elite Irish men celebrated ‘the Irish saint’ over dinner (Cronin, 2015). Yet the tradition of parading really started in the 1760s amongst Irish Catholic members of the British Army in New York looking to re-connect with their Irish roots.

Emigration and the influence of the Irish diaspora in the 19^th century heightened this holiday’s transnational appeal. The famines in Ireland encouraged some 2 million to emigrate from the island, with most settling in America and Britain (The Economist, 2018). Irish-Americans celebrated their Catholicism and venerated Irish nationalism but they also stressed their patriotic belief in their new home. This explains why Cronin has described St. Patrick’s Day at that time as ‘a public declaration of a hybrid identity’ – one based on the ‘belief in the future of Ireland as a nation free from British rule’ along with ‘a strict adherence to the values and liberties that the U.S. offered them’ (Cronin, 2015).

By the mid-20^th century the holiday had become a celebration of all things Irish and was widely established across America. But celebrations had also become common across the world by this time. The Caribbean island of Montserrat officially marks St. Patrick’s Day with a ‘freedom run’, amongst other things, reflecting its history as a refuge for persecuted Irish Catholics as far back as the 17th century. Every March 17^th Montserrat embodies a transnational fusion of Irish, African and Caribbean tradition. Tokyo has hosted St. Patrick’s festivities since 1992, made all the more unique by the fact that it is largely organized by people who aren’t Irish (Janik, 2015). In Malta the day has been celebrated since the early 20^th century originating with soldiers of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who were stationed in Floriana.

A combination of flexible historical origins with the growth of Irish emigration and openness to the expression of Irish identity across the world seems to give this celebration a distinctly transnational relevance and appeal. It might also just reflect a global appreciation for drinking Guinness, but that’s a more disputable point for another day.

References

Cronin, Michael, & Adair, Daryl, The wearing of the green: a history of St Patrick’s Day (London, 2002).

Michael Cronin, ‘How America Invented St. Patrick’s Day’, (2015) accessible at: http://time.com/3744055/america-invented-st-patricks-day/

Rachel Janik, ‘How St. Patrick’s Day Became the Most Global National Holiday’, (2015) accessible at: http://time.com/3746018/st-patricks-day-global/

The Economist, ‘How St Patrick’s Day celebrations went global’, (2018) accessible at: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/09/how-st-patricks-day-celebrations-went-global

First I should probably explain what Polandball is and why it is relevant. Polandball is a genre of user generated internet comics where different countries are represented by balls with eyes and the national flag on them. Polandball is a mixed bag like most things on the internet some of the comics are downright offensive or wrong, but a lot of them are funny and surprisingly insightful representations of history and international relations. I learned about Polandball several months ago because my boyfriend spends way too much time on Reddit. The upside to this is that he forwards me the best of what he sees, this is mostly cat videos, but also a great deal of Polandball. I began to realise that Polandball could actually be a valuable tool for getting quick simplified, but memorable summaries of history and politics.

In Polandball the default unit is the nation (the ball), but most comics are about interactions between nations. I started to wonder what different levels of historical analysis would look like as illustrated by Polandball. I have some basic graphic art skills and I couldn’t sleep last night so I decided to take a shot at it. These representations are of course over simplifications, but hopefully they’ll be helpful and/or amusing.

Thanks to the internet in general for the base images.

At the conclusion of today’s Unconference, after successive rounds of collaborative writing, group discussions, and an extremely valuable debate over the superior chocolate in a box of Celebrations (the revisionist position: the Bounty has been widely and quite wrongly neglected in recent scholarship), I find myself feeling unusually optimistic.

Less than a week away from the next deadline, not only do I now feel confident in our ability to crack some of the methodological conundrums that we will be discussing in our essays, but I find I am genuinely excited by the direction of some of our conversations regarding the field of transnational history more broadly.

Within my first group, the conversation was largely to do with our shared interest in the scope for transnational history prior to the late modern era, loosely defined. To indulge in the spirit the day and to free ourselves from the tyranny of multiples of ten, let’s call it the period before 1853.

It appeared very quickly that we shared several ideas amounting essentially to the validity of studying transnational history during this earlier timeframe. These included but were not limited to the idea that, although it was not necessarily a dominant aspect of either personal identity or interpersonal relations, there was at least some kind of national consciousness emerging in European societies during this period, though it will have been conceived and expressed differently at different times and in different spatial or cultural contexts.

Yet again, this led me to thinking— and, forcibly but effectively, to writing —about the need for a closer examination of these emerging solidarities using a transnational lens, an issue with which I have already had a brief encounter in the research and planning of my project proposal. Like Nicholas, I think a lot of my ideas here were inspired by the work of Alison Games, who effectively lights a bonfire under the assumption that early English encounters with distant peoples were dominated by the rationale of different nations or of nationality. However, there is also no doubt in the title of her work that these were English cosmopolitans, however mild or adaptable their connection to their place of origin might have been. And the fact that the nation did not appear to be especially dominant in these exchanges arguably makes it even more interesting when expressions of national identity or the national character of their mission or group do emerge at this time and at these sites.

This leads me nicely onto the subject which I hope to explore in greater detail in my first essay: namely, the construction of space in transnational history. By this, I mean that I want to interrogate the replacement of earlier ‘national’ (and perhaps international) frameworks with an emphatically ‘transnational’ framework which I believe exhibits a number of comparable weaknesses.

Defining his own approach to transnational history in 2008, Erik van der Vleuten lamented that ‘the national histories of the nineteenth century naturalised the nation as the most significant form of human solidarity,’ and, in a move that perhaps encapsulates the mood of the transnational movement, he goes on to ask whether history can unmake what it did so much to make in the first place.

However, I do wonder whether, so far, we have been so preoccupied with unmaking these old assumptions, often focusing on anything but the nation in our attempts to usurp its former dominance, we have forgotten the importance of remaking its history from a new perspective. For in their quest to document more attractive objects of study in the form of transnational lives, spaces, and objects, transnational historians have neglected to re-examine the nation as a historical artefact with a transnational history of its own. And, more concerningly, they have often struggled to reconcile the somewhat limiting scope of ‘transnational’ history with a complex world of connections and migrations not only between the more unitary or, at least, artificially unified entities we would consider nations, but between spaces better understood as composites, borderlands, connected regions, or localities.

Not twenty-four hours ago, these problems would have been frankly terrifying. But today has been a day for challenges, and if our Unconference was any indication, I sense that we are beginning to move from our frantic unmaking of definitions in Week 2 to a gradual but determined remaking.

Bibliography

Erik van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a Transnational History of Technology: Meanings, Promises, Pitfalls’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 974-994. (Quoted from p.982 – thanks to Nick for tracking this down, it’s a brilliant summary, and a very common take on the transnational agenda.)

When Edmund Burke spoke at one of the many trials concerned with the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788—1795), he offered a scathing diagnosis of the British East India Company. At the heart of his accusation, the idea that the Company was effectively ‘a state in disguise as a merchant’ has persisted in scholarly works and in popular imagination for hundreds of years since. So great is its archival legacy that, over the years, many commentators have remarked that the administrative machinery of the Company more closely resembled that of a state than a corporation (Stern, 2012). Yet like so many former or ‘almost’ states — whether forgotten through being subsumed by a more powerful successor, or simply transformed beyond recognition over time — the extensive records of the East India Company have not guaranteed an extensive historiography. 

A relatively small number of narrative histories form the backbone to this body of scholarship. These can, of course, supply us with the requisite chronology — but the life and the times of the East India Company are two very different beasts. As E H Carr noted to wide acclaim, historians are not chroniclers (Carr, 1961). It is therefore very striking that so much of the argument over this strange institution remains more to do with its chronology than its character.  There is, and surely will continue to be, much debate as to the significance of the early period in the Company’s operations to its future as a colonial power. Can we isolate in the seventeenth century an age of partnership between the EIC and its contacts overseas? Or already in these encounters, can we discern the sinister beginnings of an age of empire: the construction of others and selves, of East and West (Said, 1978), even the creation of the Third World (Fanon, 1968)?

These are important questions — but they are not the only questions, nor are they necessarily the best way of asking them. What is largely missing from these debates, and what this project aims to provide, is an attempt to reconstruct the early world of the East India Company that does not rely exclusively on long-term structures and global scales. Instead, this study will give preference to the human actors: a belated ‘history from below’ of the merchants and adventurers who sailed across the world four centuries ago, whose actions and decisions form the vital nervous system of a corporation which simply could not have existed without the networks of people on which depended its networks of trade.

Beyond the Francis Drakes and Robert Clives of classroom folklore, it will consider characters such as Peter Floris and Lucas Antheunis, two Dutchmen employed by the English East India Company in 1609 based on their attractive promise of opening a profitable trade not only with the Coromandel coast of India, but across the Gulf of Siam. It will also consider the Company’s early interactions with native populations, from the so-called ‘spice islands’ of South East Asia to the court of Mughal Emperor, examining a range of accounts from letters and journals in order to examine how these merchants variously invoked and ignored the supposedly ‘national’ character of the Company in order to win greater favour and greater profits.

To this extent, at least, the project owes much of its initial scope to the debates of the 1980s, in which historians first sought to challenge the privileged position of the nation in traditional historiography. No longer perceived as central, universal, or inevitable, the cultural force of the nation has since been laid open to intensive reevaluation on a local and a global scale. As effective ambassadors of their places of origin, transnational actors are naturally of particular interest to such a project.

However, transnational history having many of its own roots in the ‘post-nationalist’ moment of the 1980s, there have so far been relatively few transnational historians willing to write on the subject. Having learned to scorn the ‘invented tradition’ of national histories (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), and to eschew the anachronism — even the simple error — of relying on the nation as a unit of analysis (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), this should perhaps come as no surprise. Yet, as this project hopes to demonstrate, whether or not nations are necessarily reliable as units of analysis, there should be no doubt as to their value as objects of analysis, especially when examined at new sites or using new perspectives.

Hence, through a detailed study of these early adventurers and their relationships, both with their fellow Europeans and with the diverse peoples they encountered across the Indian Ocean, this project will seek to interrogate the significance of the nation in the exchanges of the early English East India Company. Fundamentally, it aims to go beyond the question of ‘when was the nation, and where?’ to ask instead: when did it matter, and why? And, of course, its vital attendant, when did it not? And what mattered more?

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Birdwood, George and Foster, William (eds.), The Register of Letters &c. of the Governor and Company of Merchants trading into the East Indies, 1600—1619 (London, 1893).

Burke, Edmund, ‘Trial of Warren Hastings Esq: Third Day, 15th February 1788’, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol 13, (London, 1822), pp.1-87.

Foster, William (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615—1619: As Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence (New Delhi, 1990).

Strachan, Michael and Penrose, Boies (eds.), The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615—1617 (Minneapolis, 1971).

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

Carr, E H, What is History? (Cambridge, 1961).

Chaudhuri, K N, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-stock Company 1600-1640 (Abingdon, 1999).

Hall, Catherine (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 2000).

Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1968).

Games, Alison, ‘English Overseas Merchants in an Expanding World of Trade, 1590–1660’, in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2008).

Games, Alison, ‘All the King’s Men: Governors, Consuls, and Ambassadors, 1590–1650’, in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2008).

Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).

Gupta, Ashin Das, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (ed.), The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2001).

Keay, John, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London, 1993).

McPherson, Kenneth, ‘The Age of Commerce, 1450-1700’, in The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi, 1993).

Pettigrew, William A, ‘Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and the Local in Seventeenth-Century English History’, Itinerario, vol 39, no 3 (2015), pp.487-501.

Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

Stern, Philip J, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2012).

Winterbottom, Anna, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early Easy India Company World (Basingstoke, 2016).

Although for many ‘the Miss World Beauty Pageant’ is no more than an out-dated guilty pleasure, in its heyday the contest was covered by the BBC and drew in over 27.5 million viewers for the 1968 finale.[1] Today, similar international beauty pageants such as ‘Miss Universe’ air in over 190 countries worldwide and are seen by more than half a billion people annually.[2] The premise of the contest is simple; ‘beautiful’ women are elected annually in their own countries to represent the ‘face’ of their nation in a competition against other nations on a global stage. In looking at the Miss World beauty pageant, we can trace how a single woman can sit at an intersection of local, national and even global identities.

Whilst beauty contests have historical roots stretching back to Greek mythology, the Miss World Beauty Pageant is uniquely embedded in the British decolonisation period. Originally created by Eric Morley as a one-off event connected with the Festival of Britain 1951, the celebration of the centenary of the Great Exhibition 1851, interest piqued when the Miss Universe competition was announced in the USA in 1952.[3] As a result, Morley expanded the pageant, and by 1970 58 candidates were competing.

The tension and turmoil of the 1950s and 60s played out on the Miss World stage during its first 20 years: post-war recovery, crumbling empires, and decolonisation. Race and gender became widely discussed categories of analysis whilst Cold War clashes and civil rights movements filled television screens. These phenomena took place on an unprecedented interconnected scale in an era of heightened globalisation, mass consumerism, and mass media.

Research on beauty pageants so far is limited and has focused mainly on contemporary (both local and national) ethnographic studies of singular beauty pageants.[4] Geographically, although a transnational cultural study has been done comparing regional beauty pageants around the world,[5] ironically, international competitions themselves, such as Miss World, have not been analysed through a transnational lens.

Recently, global studies of new imperial histories and imperial visual cultures opened up new fields of inquiry that go far beyond the traditional colonial archive.[6] The extraordinary movements of images across geopolitical borders refuse such simplistic coloniser/colonised frameworks, opening up a mediated space of the transnational through which rewritings of gender, race, nation, citizenship and globalisation are occurring.[7] Now, a more nuanced view of colonialism is emerging as an intricate nexus of mutual entanglements and imbrications.

This leaves a critical research gap for a visual and cultural analysis of the Miss World Beauty Pageant during the decolonisation period through a transnational perspective. The annual competition is a site in which the meanings ascribed to individual and collective identities are continually negotiated on a local, national, and global scale. This makes it an interesting case study to look at as a site where theories of race, gender and nationhood are constructed, enmeshed, and contested.

This project aims at filling a key gap by situating the Miss World beauty pageant in global history as a legitimate and relevant matter of inquiry. Taking each pageant event as its starting point, the project will look at its media reception and how the contestants’ public image was constructed. Then it will draw on the transnational connections of how the winners came to be selected from their homelands and where they ended up after the competition. While the starting point is the competition itself, the project’s inspiration and analytical angle is inspired by global and transnational micro history and postcolonial and feminist theory.

It is precisely this crossover between local, national, global identity and issues of race and gender that sparks the following research questions: What does it mean to be a specifically feminine representation of a nation? How are race, gender, and nationhood mediated in and through women’s bodies on a global, public stage?

One tentative hypothesis is that the Miss World beauty pageant functioned to create a veneer of transnational representation. With each country lined up side-by-side labelled with a white sash, a powerful visual metaphor is created that resembles an exhibition. However there were also moments where colonial visual regimes were scrutinized, even challenged, and go beyond the simple ‘West’ vs. ‘the rest’ binary.

There is a wealth of exciting yet neglected primary source material available including Eric Morley’s biography of the ‘Miss World Story’, British Pathé newsreel snippets of each year’s highlights and photographs and tabloid articles of the winners and contestants. Due to the limited breadth of a 5000-word essay, the choice to study just 20 years of the competition is on pragmatic grounds; whist the choice to not undertake a micro-history on selected individuals or is due to the lack of source material available on each person.

[1] Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India: Decolonisations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 41

[2] H. Alan Scott, “Miss Universe 2018 in Photos: Catriona Gray of Philippines Crowned”, 16 December 2018, < https://www.newsweek.com/miss-universe-2018-pageant-photos-catriona-gray-philippines-1259769> [3 March 2019]

[3] Richard Cavendish, “The First Miss World Contest”, History Today 51 (2001) < https://www.historytoday.com/archive/first-miss-world-contest> [3 March 2019]

[4] On contemporary studies of beauty pageants see: Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (California, 1999), Radhika Parameswaran, ‘Global queens national celebrities: tales of feminine triumph in post liberalization India’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004), pp.346-370, Natasha B. Barnes, ‘Face of the Nation: Race, Nationalism and Identities in Jamaican Beauty Pageants’ The Massachusetts Review 35 (1994), pp. 471–92.

[5] See: Collen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoetje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (New York, 1996)

[6] For details on imperial visual contexts see: David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany,(Harvard, 2011)

[7] Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds), Empires of Vision: a reader (North Carolina, 2014), Raka Shome, Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies, The Communication Review 9.4 (2006), pp. 341-361.

In the shadow of the Second International: Social-democratic colonial policy in France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 1936-1958.

Historical Context:

Prior to the First World War, the parties of the Second International were bound to a firmly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist platform. Yet when social-democratic parties directly descended from the Second International were elected in France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s, they pursued, at best, a reluctant decolonization, and at worst, poured resources into maintaining overseas possessions. Central to my project is the question of why these parties seem to have undergone a massive shift in their attitudes towards colonialism prior to taking office.

Academic Context:

While the social-democratic shift on colonial policy has generated large amounts of writing specifically about it, proportionately little of that writing follows the standards of modern-day academic history. The majority of it is explicitly ideological, written by Soviet propagandists, Pan-Arabist and Pan-African revolutionaries, Maoist-Third-Worldist intellectuals, French politicians, and many others besides. It is often written as poems, party platforms, autobiographical books, polemical essays, and personal letters.

Opportunities and Dangers:

The nature of this catalogue of writing provides two opportunities, and one danger. As there is (relatively) little peer-reviewed work that is specifically focused on the evolution of social-democratic colonial policy, I have the opportunity to conduct independent research and come to my own conclusions about this phenomenon without directly shadowing another’s work.

The second opportunity comes in the form of the diverse and multi-disciplinary pool of sources that this ideological battleground provides. Politicians, philosophers, revolutionaries, and “ordinary” people alike were actively discussing the purported abandonment of strict anti-colonialism by European social-democratic parties for decades, providing no shortage of individual voices and lives to dive into.

At the same time, this rich background of writing is also a potential minefield. Many of the sources I plan to use are not merely ideologically biased; they are also self-consciously biased. Frantz Fanon and Ho Chi Minh wrote from particular ideological and cultural perspectives, while also being keenly aware of their own social, political, and historical context as they wrote. Critically analyzing both the texts themselves and the motives of their authors will be one of the most important tasks facing me in the course of this project.

Project Structure:

Due to the chronological scope of my project, I plan to split it into two sections. The first will be covered in the Short Essay, and the second in the Long Essay/”Full Project”.

The Short Essay will critically evaluate both the official stance on colonialism taken by the Second International before WWI and the personal beliefs about colonialism and “colonized peoples” held by prominent politicians and intellectuals within the organization. It will consider the impact the nature of the Second International as a de-facto whites-only organization, and the relative importance of electoral strategy vs ideology on colonial policy. The end goal of the Short Essay is to provide a firm intellectual and historical starting point from which the later evolution of social-democratic parties can be evaluated.

The Long Essay will critically analyze the four different interpretations of the social-democratic turn that I have found turn up most frequently in the primary and secondary sources of the mid-to-late-20^th century.

The first interpretation, put forth most often by Soviet and Soviet-sympathizing Marxist intellectuals and politicians, is that the social-democratic turn on colonialism was first and foremost a betrayal by the intellectual elite of Western social-democratic parties that could have, and should have, been avoided.

The second interpretation, put forth most often by intellectuals and revolutionaries from colonial or formerly-colonial regions, is that this evolution was inevitable, given that the voting base of said parties being almost entirely located in the imperial core. Continuing colonial exploitation was directly in the material interests of citizens and politicians alike, outweighing ideological legacy.

The third and fourth interpretations are those most often put forth by those intellectuals and politicians who sought to defend social-democratic parties against the charge that they were betraying the legacy of the Second International. The third interpretation is that the political and economical realities faced by social-democratic parties necessitated a pragmatic approach to the colonies, and that a more radical approach would have resulted in worse results. The fourth interpretation puts social-democratic parties in a paternalistic role, portraying the colonies as a civilizing mission justifiably spreading modernity.

These intellectual currents will be critically examined, with an eye towards determining both their accuracy in the historical context as well as the motivations (ideological, personal, or otherwise) behind these views. The project will conclude with a determination of which interpretation (if any) is most accurate. If none comes close, I will seek to provide an alternative hypothesis that does, one that takes both my own research and the existing historical narratives into account.

Japan’s entry into the modern, globalised era arguably came in the 1850s with Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853 and the forced opening of Japanese ports to Western trade and commerce. The bluntness of Western imperialism, as epitomised by Perry’s expedition, encouraged Meiji Japan’s own imperial expansion in East Asia, driven further by state aims of modernization and the growing need to protect its fragile national security. Migration became a crucial facet in the growth of this Japanese empire in two interconnected ways; firstly, in places that Japan occupied such as Taiwan (1894), Kwantung Province (1905) and Korea (1910), settler colonialism helped to establish a lasting Japanese presence and secondly, Japanese emigration and settlement across the Pacific to sites on America’s Western frontier like Hawaii and California from the mid-1880s was increasingly utilised by Japan as a model to aid in modernization and empire-building back home. This project’s focus lies in the latter – exploring this link between emigration to America and Japan’s imperialism in East Asia, focusing on the context of wartime policy.

The historiography in this field has so far sparsely addressed the transnational linkages between Japanese American immigrants and the empire back home largely due to the gulf between Japanese American history and modern Japanese history. This gulf has largely been sustained by Asian Americanists since the 1960s who have emphasised their racial history against Eurocentric narratives within histories of America’s national formation. This issue points not only to the politics of ethnic studies but also the conventional nationalisationof fundamentally transnational experiences. Yet some pioneering work has been able to escape these limiting trends. Notably, Eiichiro Azuma’s work ‘Between two empires’ has greatly contributed to a nuanced understanding of the Issei (first-generation Japanese to immigrate to America), their simultaneous negotiation of American and Japanese identities and issues of racial subordination. Pedro Iacobelli’s (et al.) volume Transnational Japan as History has also highlighted Japan’s interconnectedness to regions beyond the Asia-Pacific from a variety of different scales.

However, scholars bridging fields of Japanese-American history are yet to assess the role of war in the Issei’s (and their descendant ‘Nisei’) engagement with the Japanese nation-state and empire and reciprocal use of Issei experiences by the Japanese state, which is surprising given the frequent passing comments to Issei patriotism during wartime across existing research. This project seeks to address this gap, whilst re-balancing the focus towards the ideas, motives and actions of the immigrants themselves, not only how the Japanese state managed them.

With this in mind, this project currently forwards a three-pronged hypothesis; firstly, that Japanese immigrants in America from 1894-1945 did provide a fitting example for Japanese imperial strategy in East Asia. Secondly, and more importantly, that Japanese Americans themselves forwarded nationalist and colonial narratives – interacting with their homeland in the context of their marginalisation within American society. Thirdly, that this sentiment grew stronger in the contexts of Japan’s wars in this period.

To construct this argument, Japanese immigrant experiences in America will be contextualised in the cases of the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), the First World War (1914-1918) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). These cases are chosen pragmatically for the scale of impact these wars had on Japan, and to a lesser extent, America.

From a methodological standpoint, because the central focus of research is on how far Japanese immigrants across the Pacific were affected by, and subsequently contributed to (directly and indirectly), Japan’s East Asian wars, the analytical perspective will begin and end with them. In doing so it will also have to evaluate the driving motives of immigrant actions – was it marginalisation by American society or an existing deeply-held allegiance to Japan that drove Issei (and Nisei) patriotism? To answer this question requires the roughly fifty-year timeframe adopted by this project. With all this in mind, this research will use a micro-historical approach, particularly when making the empirical and analytical connections to Japanese state policy in wartime. Similarly, it will follow the transnational turn within migration studies to view migrant lives in the context of an ever-evolving reciprocal relationship between homeland and receiving country.

Forming this composite argument, which accounts for the perspectives of actors within America and Japan and covers scales from the ordinary Japanese American immigrant to the Japanese military official, will require primary source material to be diverse. In particular, this project will look at the writings of immigrant intellectuals (termed by Azuma as ‘Issei Pioneers’), the numerous political pamphlets published by the Japanese Association of America and Japanese Chamber of Commerce and translated statements of Japanese officials – amongst other sources from digital archives charting the Japanese American immigrant experience, such as the Densho digital archives.

Reference List

Azuma, Eiichiro, Between two empires race, history, and transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005).

Iacobelli, Pedro (eds.), Transnational Japan as History: Empire, Migration, and Social Movements (New York, 2016).

Densho Digital Archives, http://densho.org/archives/ (accessed 07/03/19).

The Opium Trade was an international network to behold. The diversity of actors involved in the trade make its history truly transnational. Over the course of the late modern period, Opium came to be the most important commodity in Western trade with China. The Dutch and Portuguese first began smuggling Opium into East Asia via their trading posts in South Asia. Once Dutch and Portuguese influence in South Asia began to subside, the British government, along with East India Company, sought to mitigate their trade imbalance with China by capitalising on the Opium Trade and dominating it. By 1840, the trade imbalance was reversed and China was spending more silver on Opium than it was receiving for tea and porcelain. India was the primary staging ground for growing poppy and producing Opium. Merchants would smuggle Opium from Indian ports to Guangzhou, formerly Canton, which was at the time the only international trading hub in all of China. Realising that the Opium Trade was beginning to pose serious social and economic issues, the Chinese government attempted to crackdown on the trade. The British, seeing a threat to their profits, sent an expeditionary force to Guangzhou and began the First Opium War. The British decisively crushed all Chinese resistance and forced the Qing Emperor to agree to the Treaty of Nanjing, which ceded Hong Kong to the British government, forced China to open its ports to international commerce and ensured the continuation of the Opium Trade. British coercion and the persistence of the Opium Trade crippled the Chinese economy and led to a rapid influx of international actors within China.

The macro-historical ramifications of the Opium Trade have been extensively speculated upon by historians and politicians. Much of the historiography regarding the Trade can be placed into what Dilip Basu termed “detriment” and “benefit” theories. Those favouring the benefit theory generally view the trade as a cause for spreading liberal economics and westernised international relations norms to a stubborn and non-conforming China. These views were popular among Western-imperialists throughout the trade itself and maintained a significant presence in historiography until the second-half of the twentieth century. Detriment theory stipulates that the Opium Trade, driven by Western economic interests and imperial expansion, contributed to the complete collapse of the Qing government, debilitated much of the Chinese population and led to exploitation by foreign powers until the success of the Communist Revolution in 1949. Detriment theory originated at the height of the trade, as many Western observers recognised that Britain had deliberately inundated an entire country with narcotics and condemned British involvement in Opium smuggling. Naturally, the most fervent devotees of detriment theory have been Chinese. The rise of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 20^th century coincided with the spread of fervent Chinese nationalism. Chinese historians came to regard the first Opium War as the beginning of the “Hundred-years of Shame” in which China was dominated by greedy, imperialist foreign powers. Western historians writing in the second-half of the 20^th century leading up to today have subscribed to detriment theory but have also expanded their scope of research to other elements of the Opium Trade, such as evaluating India’s role in the centre of Opium production and determining how international private merchants may have enabled the profitability of the trade. Overall, historiography on the topic is extensive and provides a diversity of approaches to consider.

I would like to hone in on the period of international convergence that resulted from the Opium Trade. It caused a collision of worlds that – like the rest of colonial history – resulted in exploitation. Yet, unlike the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire or American Manifest Destiny, the influence of the Opium Trade and subsequent opening of China spanned across an entire continent and involved nearly all the global powers of the time. With this in mind, I will address a number of key questions in the project. Firstly, how did the economic incentives of Opium smuggling bring together a multiplicity of international actors? How did the opening of China to foreign powers change its social, political and economic make-up? Finally, what ramifications did international convergence have for China and its national sovereignty?

The comprehensive nature of literature regarding the trade makes engaging in specific research more difficult. Ideally, by engaging in the extensive historiographical and primary source material on the topic, I will be able to draw macro-historical conclusions about a transnational network that had long-lasting repercussions for China.

There is a wealth of primary source material but only from the account of British and American citizens – not from a Chinese or Indian perspective. It will be challenging to find Chinese and Indian literature in English that addresses the questions I am attempting to answer. In addition to one-sided primary sources, it must be said that one cannot separate the history of the Opium Trade from national economic and political perspectives. Despite the fact that the Trade’s chief actors were nation-states, transnationalism can still be found in the interactions between nation-states as well as the networks they tie between each other. In the Opium Trade, one finds a detailed, intriguing example of transnational confluence between nation-states.

Valide Sultans (the official mothers of the Ottoman Sultan), are ideally suited for transnational analysis. The Ottomans relied heavily on a slave system for filling high ranking positions, including in the Sultan’s harem, because they believed that slaves would not have split allegiances, or amass too much personal power, this led me to question if this assumption could possibly be correct. Transnational history[1] with input from imperial and transcultural history is perhaps the best way to examine these women’s remarkable journeys from foreign slaves to the heart of imperial power. They lived in a world of seemingly alien power dynamics, but this gives us the opportunity to gain new insights on trans-nationality gender and power in an under examined context.

Questions: 

1. What kind of power did these women wield as transnational actors and how?

2. How did their transnational origins impact the way they used their power?

-Were they biased in favour of their homelands and/or religions?

Iyigun has done a statistical analysis of the impact of the origins of Sultan’s mothers on the Sultan’s later political actions, mostly regarding where the Sultans waged war (2013). While his research has admirable statistical rigour, it almost entirely lacks biographical detail about the Sultan’s mothers themselves. The historical messiness of these women’s lives is ignored as is their personal agency, essentially in his work they are transnational, but not really actors. The lives of many Valide Sultans have been studied in greater depth in works by historians such as Pierce (1993). However, these works do not usually focus on them in transnational context. The most notable exception is Pedani’s article “Safiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy” (2000).

It becomes clear that the best way to investigate Valide Sultans as transnational actors is to investigate some of these women in depth. This is a similar approach to that taken in Early Modern Dynastic Marriages and Cultural Transfer, which while about a different geographic area presents a useful model for examining elite early modern women as transnational/transcultural actors (Casalilla, 2016). 

For this essay three Valide Sultans who were significant transnational actors will be examined. The first of these is Nurbanu (1525-1583)  who was probably taken from Corfu while it was under venetian rule, but chose to play up a likely fictional identity as the illegitimate daughter of venetian nobles (Peirce, 1993). Venetians still appealed to her to improve relations, which she did fairly successfully (Peirce, 1993). The second woman is Nurbanu’s daughter in law Sayife (1550-1619) who like her mother in-law was significant to relations with Venice, but was herself Albanian (Pedani, 2000). The third woman is Gülnuş (1642-1715) who was born on Crete while it was under Venetian rule but later in life was key to appointing its governor under Ottoman rule (Argit, 2017). Like the other Valide Sultans mentioned here she attempted to improve relations with Venice, but what is perhaps more interesting is her central role in Ottoman Swedish relations during their war with Russia (Argit, 2017). Many Valide Sultans likely had less of an impact than these women, but this essay will focus on some of the most impactful women, because their stories of rising from slavery to power in a fierce male dominated world are the most remarkable, and also because hopefully the patterns found in their lives may also be found in the lives of some of their less well known counterparts. 

These specific Valide Sultans have also been chosen out of practical concern regarding sources. There are significant secondary sources on all of them, although most are not written from a transnational perspective. In addition they all appear in a significant number of sources from their own period including correspondence both by and about them, both informal and diplomatic. In addition the activities of these women was recorded by Ottoman and European observers who had a vested personal or national interest in goings on at court. Many of these sources were translated into english by historians or in some cases for circulation nearly contemporary to their original writing. 

Based on initial research I can hypothesise that Valide Sultans did at least at times wield tremendous power, formally as regent and/or informally via personal relationships. They did this by positioning themselves at the centre of a network of transnational and imperial actors, many of whom were also women. An especially interesting pattern is the seeming importance of Kiras (non-muslim women who served as intermediaries between the harem and the wider world). Geographic and religious origin likely had some influence on Valide Sultans, but these origins do not seem predictive of their actions.

[1] Some historians question how early the term transnational can be applied (Saunier, 2013), a concern that will be addressed in greater depth in the final essay.

Sources:

Argit, Betul Ipsrili, ‘A Queen Mother and the Ottoman Imperial Harem’ in Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (ed.), Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (Oxford, 2017), pp. 207-222.

Casalilla, Bartolome Yun, ‘Aristocratic Women across Borders, Cultural Transfers, and Something More. Why Should We Care?’ in Joan-Luis Palos and Magdalena S. Sanchez (ed.), Early Modern Dynastic Marriages and Cultural Transfer (Abingdon, 2016) pp. 237-257. 

Dursteler, Eric R., Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean.

Freely, John, Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul (London, 1999).

Iyigun, Murat, ‘Lessons from the Ottoman Harem on Culture, Religion, and Wars’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 61, No. 4 (2013), pp. 693-730. 

Kravets, Maryna, ‘Blacks beyond the Black Sea: Eunuchs in the Crimean Khanate’, in Benhaz A. Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana and Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.) Slavery Islam and Diaspora (2009), pp. 22-36.

Kunt, Metin Ibrahim. ‘Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, (1974), pp. 233–239.

Lamdan, Ruth, ‘Jewish Women as Providers in the Generations Following the Expulsion from Spain’ Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 13 (2007), pp. 49-67.

Pedani, Maria Pia, ‘Safiye’s Household and Venetian Diplomacy’, Turcica, 32 (2000), pp. 9-32. 

Pierce, Linda P., Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1993). 

Saunier, Pierre-Yves. Transnational History (London, 2013).

Toledano, Ehud R., ‘Bringing the Slaves Back In’, in Benhaz A. Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana and Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.) Slavery Islam and Diaspora (2009) pp. 7-20.