MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

Given the already-complex nature of this topic, I think it’s best if I don’t spend loads of time justifying and explaining up-front why I’ve set this out like I have. Instead, I’ll explain the terms and categories as I go along!

Meta-Transnationalist Terms: These are the terms and definitions used by academics when describing the whole of or an aspect of transnationalism and transnational history. Under this category you will find ‘Subaltern Studies’, ‘Labour History’, ‘Core-Periphery’, and different interpretations of exactly what ‘Transnationalism’ means. Subcategories for Historiography, Methodology, etc. might also be useful but as of now I am unsure of how to split things up.

“Umbrellas”: These are those networks and organizations that are so large and/or diverse that within them can be found multiple examples of each of the following categories. They therefore cannot be grouped into any specific one and must be dealt with on their own terms. They can be further subdivided into purpose-built (wherin their central purpose is at least in part transnational in character) networks/organizations and diffuse networks/organizations that have developed a transnational character without direct intent on the part of any (or at least most) Actors within it. Included in the latter is the Internet and the New York Stock Exchange, while in the former lies the UN (and its subsidiary organizations), the Socialist International, and the World Trade Organization. A third sub-category might be set aside for Empires, as has been suggested by others, as a consequence of their particular historical significance.

Actors: Specific persons or organizations responsible for transnational activity. These can be subdivided into Practicing Actors and Lived Actors. Practicing Actors are those people/organizations that consciously and intentionally engage in transnational activity; in this sub-category are many scientists, diplomats, politicians, revolutionaries, etc, and their associated institutions. Lived Actors are those people/organizations who have had transnational activity impact their life but did not have direct knowledge or control over the transnational aspects of it, or those who participated in transnational activity without considering themselves as doing so. Included here are many traders, generals, soldiers, prisoners, and “common people” more generally.

Objects: What is actually being transferred across borders. This includes physical objects in the form of traded commodities, as well as non-commodities such as scientific knowledge, culture, disease, and even genetics.

Vectors: The constructed methods and “natural” pathways that enable and accelerate transnational activity. The former includes specific trade networks, diplomatic treaties, and Esperanto. The latter includes religious affiliation, cultural compatibility, global and regional economic phenomena (ex. industrial revolution), and geographic features (ex. good harbors).

Blockers: The constructed methods and pre-existing conditions blocking or impeding transnational activity. The former group includes hard borders, geo-political rivalries, and xenophobic ideologies. The latter group includes geographic impediments (sheer distance, the Atlantic, the Sahara, etc), linguistic barriers, and, again, global and regional economic phenomena.

Similar distinctions in broad categories have been made by others, both on the blog and in the last class, but I think I’ve hit on something that ought to be taken into strong consideration when planning out a broader and more ambitious “manifesto”. Specifically, I think it is extremely important, within categories, to distinguish between active and passive aspects of transnationalism. There is a fundamental difference between a 1950’s UN diplomat and a 1890’s Hong Kong peasant that is not merely a function of their different living conditions and historical circumstances. People and organizations practice transnational activity very differently when they are aware of the transnational character of that activity, and act even more differently when they are intentionally conducting that activity to be transnational. This is true across all the categories I have listed above. Diffuse trade networks operate(d) differently than the World Trade Organization, disease transmission operates differently than knowledge transmission, and constructed barriers to certain types of transnational activities (militarized borders) operate differently than more natural ones (many miles of ocean). Taking a closer look at the last example, it is clear that from the perspective of a scholar, the transnational character of a deliberately militarized border resulting from particular cultural and political developments has to be established via a fundamentally different lens than how a scholar would evaluate the transnational character of a naturally existing water barrier that forces dangerous raft crossings.

I’m having an identity problem, fortunately this isn’t one of those identity problems that pops up so often in transnational history regarding culture and nationality. I literally can’t tell who a name belongs to. The name Baffo seems to be used to describe two different Ottoman Valide Sultans, Nurbanu and Sayife. Nurbanu was the mother of Murad III and Sayife was his consort. So in less we want to get aggressively freudian (sorry psych student humour) these historical figures must be kept separate. It is also important to note that they were very frequently at odds viciously competing for influence over Murad.

Most sources describe Nurbanu as having some personal connection to Venice dating back to her childhood. The nature of the connection is itself ambiguous. According to some sources she was born to commoners of Venetian controlled Corfu, and merely liked to position herself as the illegitimate child of Venetian nobles. Other sources describe her as the child of the Venetian governor of Paros and the Cyclades. These sources describe her as the descendent of the Vernier-Baffo family which suggests that she is the most likely candidate for the name of Baffo. Nurbanu herself played up a connection to Venice and a noble origin, but was unspecific about what family she descended from.

However someone who based on biographical details is quite clearly Sayife is often also described as Baffo. However while sources about Nurbanu will often also say Baffo the same is not true of sources about Sayife. It is also worth noting that these sources often describe Baffo as Venetian, but no source that refers to Murad’s consort as Sayife refers to her as Venetian.

I’m inclined to believe that the name Baffo should best be applied to Nurbanu or not applied at all, but my real question is does that mean I should disregard sources where it refers instead to Sayife? Most of sources where Sayife is referred to as Baffo don’t have obvious errors except in mixing up her origins with those of Nurbanu. Some of these sources contain details that might be useful, can I still use them if they include what I believe is an error?

Interestingly I’m having a similar problem with their kiras (Jewish women who served as a personal secretary/chief of staff/personal shopper). Some historians question wether the word “kira” even describes the role, or is actually just the shortening of on of the kira’s names. I’m inclined to use the word kira anyway because there is not another good word for describing that role. In addition there were three prominent kiras around the time of Nurbanu and Sayife and there is a problematic tendency for them to get mixed up together or even combined into one person. One historian cleverly points out that Nurbanu and Sayife would not have used the same kira as they were nearly constantly at odds. This combined with the fact that we know some biographical details about each of these kiras makes me fairly sure there wasn’t just one. However there is some ambiguity still about which events happened to which. For example one of them was infamously stabbed to death and it has taken better historians than me a fair amount of detective work to figure out which one that is.

List – Technical Terms (Learning the Language) 

1. Introduction: Transnational History, History and Historiography. 
2. Heterogeneity, Confusions and Misunderstandings.     
3. Aims, Agendas and Aspirations.   
4. Methodological Approaches.  
5. Source Materials.
6. Spaces and Times. 
7. Mapping and Visual Aids. 
8. Conclusion. 

Reference Works and Further Readings

At the start of the semester, I was, and still am to some degree, slightly baffled by the complex of technical terms which can be quite specific to transnational history (‘nodes’, ‘translocal’, ‘glocal’ etc.). If I was to compile a book on the subject then, I think it might be handy to include a list of those expressions, accompanied by brief explanations of them at the start of the work.

I think it’s important to situate transnational history in its historiographical context too (its emergence, its comparison to other sub-disciplines of history, and how it has changed since in its character since its inception); and I think would give me reason to address those topics in the first chapter of the book. 

In the second, it might then be helpful to confront or work around the various confusions that present themselves in the practice of writing transnational history; its heterogeneity as a discipline, its flexibility as an ‘umbrella perspective’, and the way in which it functions as a ‘tool’ rather than a strict methodological approach. In this instance, it might also be useful to include the criticisms that have been levied against it in the past. 

The third and fourth are quite self-explanatory, and could address why historians have chosen to practice transnational history, break down its various sub-disciplines, and perhaps match those sub-disciplines to the areas of historical enquiry that have benefitted most from them in the past (‘translocal’ for inter-colonial spaces for example, or ‘microhistory’ for cities etc.).

‘Source Materials’, I think, should receive some serious attention. For me, using primary source materials to write transnational history has been challenging, and I’m still unsure as to how I should be reading a source through a transnational ‘lens’, whether or not there in fact is a specific way to do so, and how I should deal with a scarcity in source material (the validity of the Andrade approach for example, or something entirely different). 

The issue of space and time is something I’ve blogged about before, specifically with reference to the spatio-temporal problem of ‘transnational’ history before the rise of the nation-sate, and legitimacy of ‘transnational’ history for places in which social organization was not manifested with reference to European frameworks of Westphalian sovereignty. In this chapter, I think it might be wise to address those issues, and offer some ways in which they might be overcome (via the practice of ‘translocal’ history for example). 

Unfortunately, I missed the QGIS sessions, but skills like the ones taught there, I hear, have been very useful: it’s for that reason that I would devote the seventh chapter of the book to mapping.              

Last night I made the questionable decision to stay up to watch the premier of series six of Game of Thrones live, despite its timing of 2:00 in the morning. However it was a fantastic watch to explosively start the new season and I regret nothing! Whilst the show itself sees characters cross borders and cultures and crosses the globe for filming locations, after watching it occurred to me how many other people around the world would have been seeing this episode at exactly the same time revelling in the same plot points and set pieces. Season seven’s premier garnered an enormous ten million, nearly double the population beyond the wall (Scotland) and it can be assumed that season eight’s viewer base will only increase in number. With viewer ratings this large, it can be safely argued that Game of Thrones has passed from a tv show into being something of an international cultural phenomenon. It may have been my sleep deprived mind overelaborating but I couldn’t help but feel connected to everyone across the world who was watching at the same time. When I was looking back through previous projects as well, I saw that a previous student of the module had based their project off the international permeation of Disney. I found it interesting to contemplate how mundane and small transnational linkages can apparently be. Although Game of Thrones as a fantasy adventure series is unlikely to have a massive impact or ramifications, it is undoubtedly true that other internationally watched forms of media may do. What message does it send that the FIFA World Cup has been held consecutively in Russia and Qatar two states with infamously poor records on LGBTQ and in Qatar’s case women’s rights? Similarly Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, which at its peak had seventeen million viewers used its platform to preach a liberal centrist philosophy of government. It is noticeable that much of the occurrences on The West Wing presaged actual events, with the show seeing the placement of a Latino Supreme Court judge nine years before Obama followed suit. All this amounts to the conclusion that with such an internationally broad viewer base, whilst it might not be the job of shows such as Game of Thrones to proselytise positive values and equality, many media executives would do well to remember the powerful transnational platform upon which they operate and the messages which they choose to spread from this foundation.

As I was talking to Sophie and Nick in class this week, I was relieved to find out that I was not the only one who gets excited about a beautiful contents page. I realised this as we were describing our ‘dream transnational history students’ handbook’, and we all started to get very worked up about index pages, chapter introductions and comprehensive further reading lists. You know you’re speaking to a history student when someone says, “It makes my day when I pick up a book and the chapters themselves are categorised and organised by theme”. In our group, we got so into the idea of being able to organise the structure of the contents page that in the end there was very little content actually in it in terms of what themes we actually wanted to see there.  

In light of this, I’ve had a think about what I personally would like to see in the Isabella West edition of a Transnational History Students Handbook and this is what I’ve come up with. 

But first, I’ll break down the structure of the book. 

As well as an introduction and conclusion, the book would consist of 4 (or more – these are just my ideas) chapters organised around themes. Within these chapters there would be a short introduction with some key words and discussions, followed by a very thorough reading list and 3-4 articles as examples of the concepts raised above. After every article there would of course be another reading list because who doesn’t love a good reading list.

Below, are just a few points I think would be interesting to consider in the introductions of each chapter. 

INTRODUCTION

• Give transnational history a definition! By a definition, I do not mean the definitive definition, but one that can get students excited about what this approach entails. A Clavin-style discussion as to its ambiguity can come after, but before this you need to give the term some scope and meaning. In my mind, this book is targeted at our previous selves some 10 weeks ago, and I know that 10 week ago me would have appreciated a little bit of clarity just to get me thinking about the possibilities this kind of history holds. 
• Context! As a relatively recent concept, it would also be great to know where transnational history is situated within wider historiography: how it emerged, where it emerged, what it emerged out of etc.   
• Key debates! A quick discussion regarding the most relevant discussions occurring in the field at the moment would follow but only as an introduction to the rest of the chapters. 
• Reading List! This handbook is only a guide that would serve as a springboard to students’ further reading so this reading list would be a critical aspect of every chapter.  

1. THE NATION: Do we stress the trans or the national? 

This was actually the only topic Sophie, Nick and I got to talk about, which probably says something about its significance in our minds. Under this topic I would like to see how the nation fits into but also challenges transnational concepts and approaches. This could borrow from and include aspects of the OXO article and AHR conversation, which highlights the tensions and opportunities of deviating from traditional national narratives.  

Example of article: Perhaps the most relevant article I can think of at the moment might just be Zoe’s future essay on European identity as an example exploring national identities within supra-national organisations 

2. EMPIRE

The majority of the topics we have chosen involve the concept of empires in one capacity or another so it’s clear that there is a wealth of material here to choose from in terms of themes. I personally would enjoy sections on non-human actors such as disease or commodities, subaltern migration and mobility, trans-imperial networks and decolonisation theory and the reciprocal influence it has had on transnational history but I’m aware these are just topics that I find particularly interesting. 

Example: Curless’s The Triumph of the State demonstrating the advantages and limitations transnational history has created in examining the emphasis, or over-emphasis of inter-territorial networks. 

3. ACTORS

This chapter could certainly be taken in a variety of directions. However, I think this could be a good place to look at approaching transnational sources. Inspired by the reading on biographies, it would be interesting to consider how studying transnational actors could encourage historians to place more emphasis on the lived experiences of actors in history. Though I remember there being speculation in class about blurring the lines between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’, this section could perhaps take a creative approach in examining transnational actors, whether it’s through novel approaches such as GIS or maybe even delving into historical fiction 

Example: Despite the controversy this caused, I would choose the Andrade article to most effectively demonstrate the possibilities transnational history could yield.

4. SCALE

Here, the Saunier article would serve as a basis for the key debates and issues raised since it generated so much debate when we discussed it in class. The issue of bridging local, regional, national and global scales without regarding them in any sort of hierarchy was of particular interest to me. To address this, the chapter should look at micro- and global- histories independently and then provide an example that links the two together.  

Example: Saunier, Pierre-Yves. Transnational History. Theory and History. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 

Precisely determining whether a historical figure’s words are accurate in content and honest in intention is not always possible when studying and writing history. Ancient historians in particular must often make carefully considered value judgments on whether to trust, say, Procopius in his description of Emperor Justinian. Procopius is a clearly biased source (towards the Emperor during his time as his official historian, and against in his Secret History, written later), but he must be dealt with and used somehow due to the relative lack of other contemporaneous sources for the time period and places he describes. Moving closer to the present day, some of the same problems around authorial intent disappear, but most remain, and a few new problems unique to modern history arise.

Modern historians, unlike ancient historians, usually do not have to deal with the question of whether a person existed or whether an event actually occurred. The invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy from the beginning of the modern era meant that most important events and persons have independent verification from different contemporaneous sources. However, this explosion of documentation in some respects makes the problem of authorial honesty and intent more difficult to address. In the late modern period especially, actors, and particularly transnational actors, are increasingly aware that their words will be read and listened to not just by the intended audience, but also by unintended and sometimes hostile audiences as well. More than ever, politicians, ideologues, and intellectuals have a motive to disguise, embellish, and sometimes outright lie about their beliefs and goals. 

This is something that I have to come to terms with when researching and writing my project. Because I am trying to determine, fundamentally, the ideological legitimacy of the post-WW1 Internationals, the question of bias has to be taken head on. The issue is that both sides (pro- and anti- on the position of whether the post-war colonial policy of the social-democratic Internationals is derived from that of the pre-war International) accuse the other of acting in bad faith. On the extreme ends, authors like Frantz Fanon accused the Labour and Socialist International of being a purely cynical vehicle for the maintenance of neocolonialism, while French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, among others, accused Algerian nationalists of using the “red drapery of socialism” as cover for their war crimes and human rights abuses. A more mundane example would be Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald speaking of Labour’s “commitment to our common cause” in private letters to Indian socialists while disavowing any dual loyalty to anything but King and Country when questioned in Parliament.

This sort of rhetorical ping-pong and double-speak is endemic in my primary sources dating from the mid-20^th century. Parsing through the sometimes contradictory statements of politicians is difficult, but I am not, thankfully, finding the task impossible. Actions speak louder than words, and in the case of active politicians and public figures, it is relatively easy to trace links between particular statements and policies that do or do not follow those statements. Somewhat more difficult to deal with are intellectuals who were not put under the same pressure to “put up or shut up”, if you will. Confirming the depth of commitment to a particular pro- or anti- colonialist platform in those cases requires more work.

            I’d be interested to hear if this issue of self-conscious bias or misrepresentation has come up for other people conducting projects in the late modern period? If so, what strategies and methods have you come up with or come across to help deal with it?

This week in class we were asked to brainstorm how we would construct a transnational handbook. After a short five minutes, we soon found there seemed an endless list of terms and concepts that could fall under the historical discipline of transnationalism. Reflecting back on the readings and discussion we have had this semester, I would argue there is no consensus on what exactly constitutes as transnational history. However, I do not find this problematic. Though I am a stickler for clean and concise definitions, I do not think anything is added but “straight jacketing” the term transnational to the confines of a set definition.  By leaving the discipline up for interpretation, transnationalism is allowed legs, raising the subject as starting point for larger conversations regarding migration, identity, and cross border initiatives. While I have already listed three areas of exploration that come as symptomatic subsections of transnational history, this is merely a truncated list of the larger implications transnationalism could have on other fields of study.

With this in mind, I would construct a “manifesto” or historical handbook of transnational history as such:

1. Include a vague meaning of transnational: a cross border initiative. I would then continue highlighting all the ways this can be done such as studying transnational actors, movements, or ideas. Next, In this same section I would outline some of the disagreements within the field, showing where historians disagree on the current definition and future of transnational history.
2. I would define transnational actors, giving a rough overview of what transnational actors are, and what role they play in cross border initiatives. I would make sure to include examples from all periods of history, from merchants in the early modern period to European Parliament members in 2019.
3. Next, I would go on to discuss transnational commodities such as ideas, human rights movements, and political ideologies. For example, there could be a transnational history conducted on the breath of Communism globally in the 1900s. Additionally, there could be a transnational history done on the assembly line and its global impact. It is important to include this section to show that not only people and nations can be transnational, but commodities and ideas count as well.
4. It is also important to acknowledge how to measure transnational history, referencing a global, local or even “glocal” approach. Here I would include a few articles as examples and a testament of how differently historians categorise transnationalism through the use of scales/measures.
5. I would also include a section on transnational organisations. Organisations such as the EU are sometimes thought of as international or supranational but very rarely referred to as transnational. In other words, most people know what the EU is but not what transnational organisations are.  If the EU was introduced as a transnational organisation, showing how its policies and legislation affect citizens and nations across borders and EU member states, then the general public might gain a greater appreciation and understanding for “transnationalism.” For example, many European understand that they are EU citizens and that the EU somehow regulates their national government, however they might not understand why this is transnational. By introducing it as a transnational, a foundation is laid to make further connections between international and supranational organisation to the discipline of transnational history.

Lastly, I would include a list of the top ten leading historians practicing transnational history. By citing a collection of each historian’s articles, showing how the studies vary from each other, the true magnitude of the discipline can be felt. This will drive home the point that transnational history is ever changing, cutting edge, and widespread. It is not a concept easily defined or caged into a specific category.

(Please excuse my delay in posting this week: I was called into work unexpectedly today, otherwise this would have been published for the noon deadline.)

When I was a child, I remember always, always wanting to know more about my family.

From the time I was primary school to perhaps the age of sixteen, I was repeatedly astonished to find that so many of my friends and classmates often could not even recall the their grandparents’ names, let alone details of their lives, what they had done, who they had known, or where they had been.

I suspect that my own interest in these questions very likely grew out of the fact that for most of my life, most of that family seemed to live fantastically far away. Most of them, my father’s many, many siblings, had scattered within the last thirty or forty years, chasing opportunities for work or simply the hope of a better life. I remember counting off the places to my two closest primary school friends:

Australia, Ghana, New Zealand, Los Angeles.

In theory, I had even visited two of them, in better days, long before I could actually remember them. But really, they were more like words to me than actual places, more imagination than tangible reality.

Yet even much closer to home, in some of my more enduring memories of my family, it is possible for me to trace a continuing fascination with place: that peculiar mix of connection and disconnection, of familiar and exotic, and always the questions of where? how far? what is it like?

Between occasional trips to see my grandparents and the regular reminiscences of my own mum and dad, it happened that from an early age, ‘Up North’ was cemented in my mind as not so much a relative term as a defined place on the map, beginning somewhere in Sheffield and mysteriously melting away at the Scottish Borders.

By the age of five or six, I had learned to recognise the final stretch of the journey to my Nana and Granddad’s house by the glowing ‘57’ sign of the Heinz factory off the M6 motorway, the red lights of the mast on Winter Hill, even by the peculiar shape of the street lamps: neither lantern-shaped nor the usual upside-down Ls, but plastic-y looking squares with rounded corners, looking down and guiding us to our destination.

By the age of seven or eight, I could name every service station that we would pass on the route. The perennial ‘are we there yet?’ of earlier journeys was transformed into a continual live update on our progress. And for years after, when I looked at a map (and I looked at maps a lot), my distances were measured not by the given scale at the foot of the page, but by the sacred knowledge that it was 200 miles from Reading to Wigan on the M6 motorway.

But while Wigan, at least within the walls of our grandparents’ house, seemed like a sort of second home, my grandmother’s adopted home in Leeds felt like another country entirely: a greyscale jungle of high-rise flats and pebbledash houses connected by a sprawling delta of roundabouts and dual carriageways. Then, at the centre of it all, the rows and rows of red-brick houses where my Mum arrived ‘home’ for the very first time at the age of twelve when her father came out of the British Army.

My mother’s side of the family, nominally the Powers after her father, was ever the more difficult case when it came to my questioning. Certainly, their history was the more intriguing, boasting a veritable treasure trove of transnational connections and experiences.

These came to me first through the story of my mother’s life. Born in the British military hospital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (then the Federation of Malaya) in 1957, my mum’s early childhood was revealed to me in glimpses, through other people’s memories and flickering video footage:

A frowning baby in the arms of my grandmother. The young Malay woman who worked as a housekeeper for the family, whose name is half-remembered, the spelling unknown, who might well be still alive. A tropical storm which sent a bolt of lightning crashing through the entrance of their home, along a central corridor, and miraculously out the other side.

Three years later, when her father was posted to Monchengladbach, near Düsseldorf, Germany, and the scene changes yet again:

A house in an army compound on the site of a former psychiatric hospital (then more properly known as an asylum), still partly visible on Google Earth. Primary school with the British Forces Education System. My mother’s parents, each the leader of a Scout pack. Her mother, a Scot, who spoke German ‘as well as the Dutch’. My own mother, whose snippets of German were just sufficient to scrounge sweets and biscuits from the cleaners before running off to cause mischief.

She was not the only one who returned to an unfamiliar home nine years later, in the winter of 1969.

For my grandmother, at least, the decision had been a tactical one: not wishing to return to her own family troubles in either Scotland or to their offshoots in South of England, their settling in Leeds was a deliberate act of avoidance, much more her choice than it was her husband’s.

For my grandfather, the ‘return’ to England was even more dubious. For although he had served in the British Army for over twenty years, Richard Power spoke of himself first and foremost as an Irishman and a Catholic, though he had nominally rescinded his faith in order to marry my grandmother (who belonged to the Church of Scotland) shortly after the end of the Second World War.

And beyond the matter of his identity within the British Isles – or the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ as it has more recently and properly been known – there is the issue of his actual life.

For Richard Power was not born in Ireland, and nor did he ever actually live there. After the war, when we know that he served for a year or less in Africa, but little else, he spent a short period of time in Scotland and then in Germany, during which he met and married my grandmother. Two children and two postings later, to Singapore and Malaya respectively, and we are caught up with his story.

But the true crux of the matter was that my grandfather’s family had not lived in Britain or Ireland for a whole five generations, following the emigration of his own great-great-grandfather to India, probably to the port of Madras, at some point in the 1830s or 40s. His second son, an engineer in various parts of India and husband to three consecutive wives, had twelve children in all, although we know that at least four perished during infancy or early childhood.

Of the surviving children, the eldest, Charles John Power, would come to hold the position of Deputy Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Bombay Police by at least 1910. Yet after 1911, we know that he most likely fell into a state of disgrace, following his failure to prevent the escape of a notable Indian political prisoner from the RMS Morea, who had been bound for trial and probable imprisonment in his— dare I say their? —home country.

The transnational reach of the Power family would nonetheless expand yet again through lives of his children. Of the four, two of his daughters were to make the strange journey ‘home’ to England while the youngest would eventually emigrate to Brisbane, Australia. His only son, Terence Charles Power, would be buried on European soil only after perishing en route to a German prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War; his own son, my own grandfather, would face the terrors of that conflict in Africa not long afterwards.

And then we come to 1969. A husband and wife arrive at a place they call home with five children in tow. My grandfather, whose age, apparent foreignness, and unusual qualifications made it difficult for him to secure a job despite countless applications and interviews. My grandmother, for whom the loss of security and structure provided by the army meant a steady decline into drink, depression, and eventually a divorce from her husband. Five children, who were bullied relentlessly for their use of Queen’s English and who, within a year, were speaking as if their family had descended from five generations in West Yorkshire rather than five generations in British India. These including my mother, who had never acclimatised to the cold in Germany, let alone in northern England, and who suffered tremendously with asthma and recurring chest infections for all of her young life.

The Power family disintegrated upon its proverbial ‘return’, in terms both material and emotional, and much of the bitterness remains. But so too do conflicting memories: of places and identities which were never truly theirs, but also of knowledge and experiences which unquestionably were.

At seven years old, I remember my abject confusion when my Year Two teacher suggested I was using a nonsense word when I said that we had eaten ‘kedgeree’ for dinner the night before: apparently an Anglo-Indian dish which I had no idea was anything out of the ordinary in most British households. My Mum was perhaps sixteen when she was startled to hear her father argue with a local shopkeeper in fluent Urdu for some unpleasant remark he had made about the two of them, over a quarter of a century since he would last have used it.

There is great uneasiness in this story, as in all stories of the passengers, pioneers, and servants of empire. Yet it is a story that I have felt for a long time it is necessary for me to write down, if not for mere posterity’s sake, then at least for the sake of its essential humanity.

I am glad that I have now had a good reason to do so.

The 19^th century Opium Trade encompasses a vast geographic area and variety of transnational actors – so much so that it is difficult to pin down a specific network or group that can encapsulate the Opium Trade’s transnational influence. Initially I thought the Opium Trade was largely exclusive to a closed network between Britain, India (as a British colonial outpost) and China. I quickly found that this was not the case. The Dutch and Portuguese had been the first colonial powers to establish their own sources of opium production in India and trade networks in China between the 17^th and 19^th centuries. The British were ostensibly late to the party when they began using opium as a counter-balance for the tea and porcelain trade in the 1790s. In fact, it took a significant effort by the British imperial government in India to push the Portuguese out of the opium business and monopolise the trade for themselves. My more recent research has revealed that merchant companies based in the United States began embedding themselves in the buying and selling of opium shortly after it gained independence from Britain in the early 19^th century.  Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston based merchant companies would send their ships across the globe in order to capitalise on the profitable albeit illegal smuggling of opium to Canton. The first stop for American ships would be in what is now Southern Turkey, where opium was harvested and sold in bulk at commercial centres. They would then push on to Canton where they would sell to opium British or Chinese smugglers.

If I focus purely on the networks of American, Indian and British merchants instigating the trade, I would risk diminishing the Chinese perspective of the trade, which is massively important considering opium inundated all subsets of their society and played a major role in the eventual subjugation of China by foreign powers. That being said, modern Chinese perspectives of the trade tend to be overtly nationalistic and characterise the trade as an infringement on their national sovereignty. It would also be an oversight to include American involvement in the trade without discussing the source of their opium in the Ottoman Empire.

After some brainstorming I’ve begun to speculate that in order to narrow my approach to the Opium Trade, I could focus on a single merchant firm, like Perkins and Company or Jardine Matheson. The empirical data on such firms are often accessible, and in Jardine Matheson’s case the basis of ground-breaking studies of the trade like H.B. Morse’s Chronicles. These merchant firms were transnational networks of their own. They employed middlemen of Bengali, Chinese, Turkish and South Asian descent but were managed by British businessmen. In the long run, I expect the breadth of networks to study and focus on to be beneficial as there is a seemingly limitless array of sources to pour over. There is still much work to be done!

A common concern among transnational historians is the use of transnational history. For many, it seems transnationalism is becoming a buzzword for a progressive perspective of history. Ulrike Lindner article “Transnational movements between colonial empires: migrant workers from the British Cape Colony in the German diamond town of Lüderitzbucht” offers an interesting to way to explore this. Openly, Lindner acknowledges that geographic space under investigation, the ‘demarcation’ between colonial borders in south west Africa is not transnational if the definition provided by David Thelen is considered to be gospel. This is because the political entities under investigation were not nation states but colonies.[1]

This is of particular interest to myself, as my project is based in the early 17^th century. Ideas of nationhood were yet to develop. Does this mean that like Lindner I can’t write a transnational history? The answer for me is not as simple as yes or no. Lindner states that her work is transnational, for the areas under discussion were heavily influenced by British and German colonial administrations shaped by two different national perspectives. Although, this is supported by Kiran Klaus Patel argument for national consciousness as defining factor of transnational history, it is not entirely convincing.[2] Terminology such as translocality may have been more appropriate to explore regional colonial administration, rather a suggesting a more national, universal approach to colonial policy.

Transnational history has created a new way to view history, its emphasis on movement and interconnectedness resonating in a world which has an increasingly global outlook. It is, therefore, understanding why historians such as Lindner want to utilise it, for it emphasis interaction and cooperation. This is why I find the article so engaging, as it successfully explores the interaction and movement of ‘Capeboys’ within the British and German colonial governments of south west Africa. Comparable to my work in the fact that I want to explore English merchants in relation to the Japanese and other European trade companies within Hirado, Japan. However, I am uncertain whether to call this transnational history.

I would argue that translocality is a better fit for future historical investigation. Admittedly it doesn’t have the ring of transnational history, but it opens up the historians’ perspective to so much more. By stating that the study is transnational in nature, the historian automatically places boundaries on their investigation. Translocality, on the other hand, offers a flexibility in perspective that not only allows for exploration the nation but other scales and spaces within history. This is reflected in the questions raised within the article ‘Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa’, suggesting the possibility that people can operate in multiple temporal frame works as well as highlighting the blurred boundaries in thematic history such as between Afro-Asianism, imperial and Cold War frame works.[3]

[1] Lindner, Ulrike. “Transnational Movements between Colonial Empires: Migrant Workers from the British Cape Colony in the German Diamond Town of Lüderitzbucht.” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne D’histoire 16, no. 5 (2009): 680.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective (2018), ‘Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa’, Radical History Review, 179.

Reading an article published in the New York Times a few days ago reminded me of an earlier quote from Clavin, that the value of transnational history ‘lies in its openness as a historical concept’ – though arguably, it has not been effectively studied as such. This article described the recent rise of a fungus called Candida auris; a drug-resistant germ which preys on people with weakened immune systems and has been ‘quietly spreading across the globe’ (Richtel and Jacobs, 2019). Risking sounding gloomy and pessimistic, it made me question, where is the negativity in transnational history?

So far we have seen the field of transnational history largely focused on positive, progressive themes like the growth of international organisations or inter-cultural communities, which Clavin argues has been a way for the field to legitimate and sustain itself by reference to a teleological enthusiasm for globalization (Clavin, 2005: 424). For the sake of ‘openness’ and balance, we should pay attention to mechanisms of exclusion and repulsion, as well as inclusion and attraction.

Notably, global history and histories of disease have in part accounted for the fact that ‘pathogens know no borders’ (Harrison, 2015). Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange is a notorious example, which points to how disease has shaped the destiny of civilisations and played a key role in historical milestones like the demise of feudalism. Yet these works in themselves have sometimes fallen foul of imposing ‘grand narratives’ and overly-deterministic theories of the effect of disease on a global scale. Historians have gone on to study ‘pandemics’ across the globe, such as the global epidemics of influenza in 1889–93 and in 1918–19. Though they have risked over-emphasising other scales – analysing local manifestations of pandemics and rarely the connections between them. Pathogenic exchanges have for example, arisen from the global trade in agricultural commodities.

This recent New York Times article is both a story of exchange and circulation and of exclusion which can provide a useful example for transnational history. The Candida auris germ has arisen over the past five years in tandem with the increasing overuse of antibiotics and the explosion of resistant fungi. Thus, it has reflected a common practice around the world of reliance on antibiotics but also the factors easing the active spread of germs across borders – the ease of travel across borders being one of them. The germ has presented itself in a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical centre to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa (Richtel and Jacobs, 2019).

At the same time, this pandemic has been manipulated for the purposes of exclusion and secrecy. The public know very little about this partly because when it comes to bacteria and fungi, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of ‘being seen as infection hubs’ (Ibid.). Even the Centers for Disease Control (C.D.C.) in America, given its agreement with states, is not allowed to make public the location or name of hospitals involved in outbreaks. This has facilitated a divide between institutions, state and local governments on the one hand, and the public/patients on the other.

The general importance of studying such topics as global health pandemics across various disciplines is clear. Yet this recent story also provides an illustrative example for how we can broaden our analytical scope when doing transnational history, to study previously neglected issues which aren’t always positive but nonetheless greatly (sometimes more) significant. The case of health pandemics taken here is one of many issues in need of further study, others being the rise of criminal networks, the global spread of nationalism, informal ties between dictatorships or international flows of corruption, to name a few.

Studying these ‘negative’ topics from the perspective of transnational history can highlight forces which are simultaneously inclusive by way of their indiscriminate and arbitrary nature but also exclusive in terms of how they are managed and how they evolve over time.

References

Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14:4 (2005), pp. 421-439.

Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs, ‘A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy’, New York Times, 6^th April 2019. Accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html (accessed 07/04/2019).

Mark Harrison, ‘A Global Perspective: Reframing the History of Health, Medicine, and Disease’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 89:4 (2015), pp. 639-689.

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Connecticut, 1792).

When my grandfather died in 2015, one of the things our family did together was clean out his flat and decide what should be kept, and by who. My cousin and I were assigned the task of going through his papers, books, and extensive classical music archives. I was looking forward to doing so, because in many ways Kurt Reibel was the grandparent I understood the least, in part because his terrible eyesight and hearing towards the end of his life made extended conversations with him taxing for both sides.

At the time, I thought I understood my grandfather’s life reasonably well, even if I didn’t particularly understand the man himself. Born in 1926 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, he was forced to flee the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, at the age of 12, with his mother. The only person they knew in America was Kurt’s older brother, who had emigrated earlier. Kurt’s father (my great-grandfather), and the rest of Kurt’s extended family on both sides (with the exception of two cousins who managed to stay in hiding for the duration of the war) were killed in the Holocaust, as they were unable to get visas in order to emigrate. The only reason Kurt and his mother could leave was because she was born in the Ukraine and the visa limit for Ukrainian Jews was not yet reached, unlike the Austrian-born visa list. The early years in Philadelphia were grueling and difficult as all members of the family had to work and learn a new language. I learned all this from my father and uncle; my grandfather never talked to me about that time of his life.

So, when I visited Vienna with my mother this spring break, I felt obligated to visit Grandpa Kurt’s old flat. On the first day, we took the tram out to the edge of the city to the Ottakring district. When he had lived there, it had been a poor Jewish neighborhood. Not a slum by any means, but also not somewhere the genteel of Vienna spent their time.

In that respect, it was as if nothing had changed. That part of Vienna still has artisanal jewelers, open-air markets selling everything from shoes to fish to celery, and children running wild in the streets. But today, these children are the sons and daughters of immigrants from Turkey, and the signage and cuisine are in Turkish rather than Yiddish or German. A new group of outsiders trying to make their way in a society at best aloof and at worst hostile.

We quickly found the flat; the two children of the Turkish couple living there were playing football on the street outside when we arrived. The parents weren’t home meaning we weren’t able to go inside, so instead my mother told me a story Kurt had told her and the rest of the extended family before I was born. Traditionally (at least in that part of Europe, I don’t know how universal this is/was), Passover concluded with the cheer “Next year in Jerusalem”, signifying the eternal hope of Jews to return to the Levant. The Reibels instead cheered “Next year in Vienna”, because, for emotional and ideological reasons, they did not consider Israel to be their “home”; they loved Vienna and its Jewish diaspora culture and had little interest in Zionism. However, in 1937, fascists had taken over the Austrian government and it looked increasingly likely that Austria would be annexed by Nazi Germany. Knowing that they had no choice but to emigrate or go into hiding, they ended that Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem”. Vienna could no longer be their home, and would never be again.

While Grandpa Kurt never talked about that sort of thing to me, the part of his life he was willing to talk about was his education and career, from the late 40’s to the early 90’s, as an experimental particle physicist. Kurt Reibel had had a distinguished career as the founder of Ohio State University’s experimental physics program and as a sabbatical researcher at CERN and Fermilab, the largest particle accelerators in the world. His work was so esoteric that he had difficulties dumbing it down to my level, but he was always happy to talk about it. So when I went through his office with my cousin, I didn’t think that I would find this portion of his life particularly enlightening, which proved to be incorrect.

In addition to Dvorak’s symphonies and reams of poetry, I also found that my grandfather had a rather large collection of books and essay compilations by Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Albert Einstein, and other prominent leftist leaders and intellectuals. I also knew that these were chosen and stored intentionally, because after my grandmother died two years prior, Grandpa Kurt moved (very reluctantly) into a supervised housing complex for the elderly. His new flat was much smaller than the house, so everything in the flat was something he’d wanted to keep at the expense of something else. I’d never considered what my grandfather’s politics were; he always seemed either too ornery or too theoretical in his mindset to be an ideologue.

When I brought up the collection with my father and uncle, they confirmed that while he was never a member of a communist political organization, he was what was then called a “fellow traveller”, someone sympathetic to the cause but unwilling for personal or ideological reasons to get directly involved. However, they were surprised that he’d kept the collection until his death, as they assumed he had mellowed out in his old age.

The most interesting thing they told me was that in the late 1950’s, my grandfather was brought in for questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee on suspicion of being a communist subversive. He was not accused of spying for the Soviet Union, although that is likely because at the time he was only just finishing his PHD and did not have access to any sensitive information at the time. However, the HUAC apparently feared that, like Julius Rosenberg (son of Jewish immigrants) or Klaus Fuchs (refugee from Nazi Germany), Kurt Reibel’s weak ties to the United States, expertise in particle physics, and his left-wing social sphere would lead him to become a turncoat for the Soviet nuclear program. Luckily, in the end the HUAC did not blacklist my grandfather or prevent him from being hired as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania; my family hasn’t looked to see if there are minutes of his testimony in any archives so we don’t know the precise details.

I was partially inspired to take MO3351 by my grandfather’s life story. He lived a transnational life across borders, cultures, ideologies, and even religions (he was a committed atheist by the time I knew him). Reading his copy of “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” also helped inspire my project on social democracy and colonialism. Persecuted first for his faith and ethnicity, and then for his politics, Kurt Reibel persevered and prospered. That he managed to rise so high in academia and raise a normal family despite everything he went through is amazing, and makes him one of my personal heroes.

Super Saturday, the last weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament saw an explosive match between Scotland and England as the finale to an exciting tournament. Transnationalism took to centre stage during the standout highlight of the match saw Australian-Scotsman Sam Johnstone power past the English centre pairing of Henry Slade and Samoan born Manu Tuilagi. A blistering turn of pace saw him beat the last defenders and score between the posts.
More than ever before, the transnational nature of Rugby is becoming apparent. The Vunipola brothers, whose farther played for Tonga, are proudly English having moved to England at a very young age. Billy the younger brother even attended Harrow, perhaps one of the most iconic British institutions. Similarly Tommy Allen who was part of the London Wasps academy now plays for Italy, now preferring to go by Tommaso. CJ Stander who has on multiple occasions captained Ireland
hails from a large landowning South African family.
This widespread movement of players across national borders belies the stringent national eligibility rules. To qualify to compete for a country, the player must have a direct blood link or have been in residence for five years. This will always be difficult to enforce however, especially in a sport which sees Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England compete as separate teams. Furthermore there has been a large degree of controversy over the recent movement of players. Brad Shields, who had played and lived in New Zealand was airdropped into the English team for the South African tour without having played a match for an English club. A similar situation occurred with Irelands recruitment of Bundellu Aki who when recruited by

Ireland faced large scale criticism given he was born in Auckland. However, despite his critics, he has rapidly become a cult figure following his total embrace of Irish culture.However transnationalism in rugby is not without is victims, its critics are not only dinosaurs who believe nationalism is strictly based on your place of birth. However what promotes more division is when especially in the Southern Hemisphere the enticement of players from poorer nations with the benefits that richer nations can offer. This so called player drain sees young talents leave Pacific island nations such as Samoa, Fiji and tonga at older ages, specifically poached by wealthy private secondary schools to travel to New Zealand and Australia. When I went to see Scotland vs Fiji this autumn, the vast majority of the Fijian team played in the British and French leagues. Islanders playing abroad is not in itself bad and can mean that players can afford to send their large salaries home to support their extended families and often helps to lift them above the poverty. However Ben Ryan, the Ex Rugby Sevens coach for Fiji has been very vocal in his criticisms of predatory clubs and agents who take advantage of financially illiterate islanders who are often left destitute, with subpar wages often being sliced even further following their agents often extortionate percentage has ben extracted. Therefore the players themselves are often the victims of transnationalism. This process is depicted in the harrowing French film Mercenaire. Ironically, the French national team suffers from transnationalism. With the French Top 14 league rammed with Pacific Islanders and old all blacks alongside the bureaucratic mess of the FRU the saturation of the league with foreign players has served to suppress and damage the ability to create home grown talent.
However poor management and predators aside, rugby’s increasing transnationalism is surely only a reflection and exaggeration of increasing global transnationalism. In an industry which has skill as its main capital and international competition as its most consumed product, it is unsurprising that migrant labour is very present. Despite the muddying of the water by nationalist sentiments, more often than not players frequently embrace multiple nationalities into their identity. Maro Itoje, born in London, speaks in a posh English accent and attended Harrow, regularly references his Nigerian heritage and visits his fathers country. He even studied African Studies at SOAS. It is doubtful whether anyone would question the 6’4, 130kg frame of Billy Vunipola on the sincerity of his British identity, however if he would tell you that both the Tonga and England are key to his identity. In an international sport which sees competition between nations as its pinnacle, transnationalism is not only inevitable, but enriches it. Not only this but, in the end despite its competitive nature, rugby does more to bring people together than divide them. Yet further still, it can be seen that transnationalism will always have its detractors, yet broadly it can be seen it brings people together rather than driving them apart, enriching peoples identities and experience rather than forcing them into national boxes even in a fundamentally competitive and nationalistic setting of rugby.

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.