MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

I completely understand your frustration. Like you, I’m interested in applying the transnational lens to the early modern world and those non-state actors who traversed it. I share your skepticism about the existence of relevant source material though, and your anxiety as to exactly why individuals should be discussed in the transnational context. 

First off, I’m convinced the transnational perspective is applicable to the early modern era: this is something I’ll tackle in my short essay. I was irritated by the transcripts of those transnationalists in the AHR conversation piece who expressed uncertainty as to the prospect of applying the ‘lens’ to the pre-19^thcentury period. My ego took another knock when I turned to the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, in which ‘Discipline or subdiscipline were not discriminating factors, as long as a potential author had a bent for grappling with time and the history of the last 160 years’.^[1] 

We shouldn’t take this too much to heart though. A number of ‘transnationalists’ (like me and you perhaps) find the term ‘transnational’ rather unhelpful. Take a look at this – ‘‘I have to confess that I find “transnational” a restrictive term for the sort of work which I am interested in’.^[1]Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World drew connections and comparisons between nations, societies and cultures in the 18^thcentury. 

Anyway, I think there’s scope for suggesting that ‘nations’ existed in the pre-modern world. Liah Greenfeld made this argument in her Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, as did Anthony Smith. In his article (‘Nations in Antiquity?) he conceived ‘the nation’ as a ‘moving-target’ (always in the making and never really ‘made’). You might be able to use that type of reasoning to ‘prove’ that the writing of transnational history is applicable to the early modern world. If you do, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to write a trans – ‘national’ history of a traveller like al-Nahrawali in the 16^thcentury. I think it’s more than possible.

The lack of source material on your protagonist must be frustrating. Of course, I know next to nothing about his life, but one way to explore it in a ‘transnational’ context (and make it ‘worth discussing’) might be to explore how he (or others) moved between Mecca and the Ottoman interior: via specific trading networks or waterways for example. Or you could explore how the Ottoman interior managed its imperial periphery in a much broader context. This might explain al-Nahrawali’s capacity to move across imperial space (more ‘transcultural’ than ‘transnational’ perhaps, but maybe worth considering). 

I think if you take a ‘macro’ approach in the first instance it might shed light on al-Nahrawali’s more or less ‘micro’ history.  

^[1]Bayly, Christopher A. et al. ‘“AHR Conversation”: On Transnational History’, The American Historical Review 111 (2006), p. 1442. 

^[1]Iriye, Akira and Saunier, Pierre-Yves (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History(London, 2009), p. XIX. 

Who’d of thought a Queen classic would so aptly sum up transnational history. As the first verse goes:

I want to break free
I want to break free
I want to break free from your lies
You’re so self satisfied I don’t need you
I’ve got to break free
God knows, God knows I want to break free

Much like Queen, transnational history seeks to break free, in this case from traditional grand national narratives, narratives which Wendy Kozol would argue are more often than not ethnocentric and imperialistic. Although the extent to which these histories can be conclude as lies is highly debatable, it represents an archaic form of historiography which translation history seeks to challenge. As Sven Beckert states, transnational history offers a “way of seeing” which focuses on mobility, seeking to subvert the significance of the nation state which has chained historians down for too long. The application of this can be seen in the introduction of Transnational Lives, for by taking mobility rather nation as its frame work it seeks to explore the lives of those who have previously been ignored and misunderstood by national biographers.

If the methods of anthropologist George Marcus are examined, a transnational approach to writing biographies would in fact, seem the most appropriate. Marcus argues that biographers must ‘follow the people’ examining the “chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations”, all attributes encouraged within transnational history.

Transnational history, therefore, seeks to break the reader free from preconceptions of national identity which have continuously defined the hierarchies of scholarly thought. A reaction against a binary presentation of world i.e. North vs South, West vs East, First world vs Third world, where lesser developed nations are too often simplified and overlooked. Transnational Lives takes this one step further, focusing on the significance of cultural history and feminist analysis, arguing that transnational history has too long been dominated by economic and political approaches. Traditional forms of study which have been found to display an underlying gendered schism. In this way, I want to break free is again comparable, for within the music video Queen decided to dress up as women. A funny coincidence and yet, the reaction to the video saw it banned from MTV for simply challenging social norms. Although transnational history has never produced such an extreme response, much like Queen, it seeks to challenge and push boundaries, offering new exciting ways to examine history.

An example of this can be found in the first chapter of Transnational Lives “A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife”, a work which I took great pleasure in reading. The transnational approach to Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly life illustrating racism cross national boundaries, revealing a fluidity which goes against traditional understanding.

So as this semester progresses I hope to embrace my inner Freddie and break free from the national narratives which transnational history seeks to challenge.

Delving into biographical histories this week brought me back to what I have always found so interesting in history: storytelling.

I am, and have always been, an avid reader of fiction, biography and autobiography. Whether it’s 1950s rural Naples (My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante), the fictional town of Macondo in rural Colombia (One Hundred Years of Solitutde, Gabriel García Márquez) or mid-20^th century Kyoto (Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden), it’s these characters and their settings that reveal to me most vividly, the intricate complexities of history.

I do not mean to oversimplify the method of practising biographical history by comparing it to reading or writing fiction since that is not the purpose of this historiographical approach. However, what I can say is how pleasantly surprised I was to find how similarly gripping I found these stories to be. These individual’s transnational lives – convicts, wives, nobles and the like – made for incredibly interesting, page-turning history.

Nevertheless, I also understand the criticisms of biographical history as anecdotal or obscure. One life, out of the billions that have existed, cannot possibly represent a historical process, a structure, an idea. Furthermore, as voiced by Clare Anderson, the choice of the subject is ultimately that of the biographers, in which some peoples’ lives, but not others, are seen as important or interesting enough to be committed to biography. The presentation of these subjects can often tell you just as much about the biographer as it can about the lives that are being portrayed.

However, criticisms of this form stems from the assumption that individual’s emotions, experiences and ideas have only anecdotal value in describing the great narrative of history; that the purpose of history itself is to describe and understand this great historical narrative rather than individual’s stories. If you take this view when writing biographical history, describing a life as representational of other lives in a country, a religious community, an era for example, you can end up putting people into categories, which can obscure the complexities biographical writing is so good at revealing.

On the other hand, if we look for discord and resistance in anomalous lives, particularly that which looks at colonial subjects, we can arguably lose sight of colonialism’s universal attributes and grander power structures and thus undermine an anti-colonial politics that is responsive to the commonalities of experience among the colonised.

The tensions between the micro and the macro, the particular and the universal, the individual and their contexts, are all inherent to the practise of transnational history. Yet, the biographies in the readings this week struck me, not for their value in confirming or challenging larger issues or narratives, but for their ability to evoke a more empathetic kind of historical understanding, like that gained when reading literature.

Biographies allow historians to be more sensitive to lived experiences of individuals whilst gaining an insight into the complex networks of wider, transnational historical processes, be it inter-colonial constructions of race or contradictions in the social hierarchies of the British imperial world. It is often also written in a way that is often more accessible and engaging to a procrastination-prone individual (like myself). I’ve never tackled a biography before, and have very little idea as to how to even begin to go about it, but perhaps it is the answer I’ve been waiting for, to get back to the root of what I thought history was all about, telling a story.

When place is central to the construction of one’s identity, perhaps it is only natural that humans, and especially historians, make sense of the world through strictly defined spaces. As a unit of analysis, the nation-state is often taken to be the most legitimate representation of a defined space. The flaw in this tendency, as Deacon, Russell and Woollacott point out, is that “the mobility, confusion and sheer messiness of ordinary lives threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories.” (Pg. 2) Their stories of transported convicts and the wives of both explorers and sailors demonstrated that an individual’s history is by no means confined to the state. While reading through the various chapters, I wondered if one could refocus this type of transnational history and shift the unit of analysis from an individual to a place or geographic area. Rather than focusing on how an individual or product circulated space, I wanted to discern how a singular space can be circulated by a diverse, transnational array of groups or individuals. This would stipulate that the history of a town, city, or even a state can shake off the confines of one single political and cultural identity. This seemed logical to me, as at some point in history every politically defined territory was established out of some previous entity. When each place undergoes a historical transition, individuals moved through those spaces, some of them settle and others simply passed through.

In the case of my home state, Hawaii, I find a shining example of how the history of a place cannot be defined by a one cultural and/or political identity. In realising this, I drew on what I know of the history and demography of Hawaii. Simply put, it is one of the most diverse places on Earth. It is a ‘majority-minority’ state and the only state within the U.S. that has never had a majority white population.

For some context, the Pacific archipelago that I grew up on was originally settled by Southern Polynesian people over 1,500 years ago. An indigenous culture flourished on the islands until the arrival of the British explorer James Cook in 1778. European diseases brought by explorers and missionaries decimated the indigenous population and led to increased Western involvement in the political affairs of Hawaii. Once the rich agricultural potential of the islands was realised, foreign companies poured money into establishing plantations, primarily for the production of sugar. While the largest sugar companies were owned by Americans and Englishmen, those who worked the plantations came from across the world. The largest immigrant groups were from Japan, China, Portugal and the Philippines. A distinctive local culture flourished out of the diversity on the plantations. One of the most identifiable products of cosmopolitanism on the islands remains Hawaiian pidgin, the English-based creole that became the dominant language as immigrants and native Hawaiians sought to communicate amongst each other and their Caucasian employers.

The central location of the islands in the pacific along with its deep ports has made it a prime location for strategic military operations. In the late 19^th century the U.S. government’s annexation of the islands became increasingly likely, leading Japan to send a warship in a show of strength and determination in protecting its interests on the islands. Half a century later during the Second World War, Hawaii was the primary staging ground for U.S. naval operations in the Pacific and was subject to the only foreign attack on American soil during the duration of the war. The Japanese military is even said to have had plans to take over the islands should the U.S. navy had capitulated at the Battle of Midway in 1942. The military tug-of-war ended after the war but the islands to this day hold deep cultural ties to Japan and the Western Pacific. Having grown up in a small town on an outer island, I’ve always believed that the lifestyle and values of Hawaii more closely resembled that of Southern Polynesia – like Samoa, Tahiti and Fiji – rather than the contiguous United States. Is Hawaii’s history and demographic makeup transnational? If so, how can we look at the history of other places or states as transnational?

This month I was reading an excellent article from the Economist reporting on the role of Private Military Companies (essentially mercenaries) in Syria. The more I’ve delved into the issue, the more tangled it becomes. Mercenaries are becoming increasingly prevalent across the world during late modern history, from conducting counter insurgency and piracy in Somalia to staging coups in Central Africa. By the end of the Second Gulf War, private military personnel outnumbered the national militaries. Especially concerning are the accusations levelled against contractors over potential unlawful killings in war zones which forced one of the largest contemporary companies: Blackwater to cease operations in the region and rebrand. Under intense pressure and scrutiny, the CEO and owner Erik Prince stepped down and sold the company.

In 2004, backed by British financiers including Mark Thatcher, Simon Mann is alleged to have led a group of mercenaries into Equatorial Guinea with the intention of deposing the government and securing oil rights for their western backers. Even during the current conflict in Syria, Wagner, a private paramilitary organisation has been operating largely as an extension of the military providing job opportunities for thousands of young Russian adventurists. Wagner also reportedly operated in the Crimea alongside separatist forces. Alongside reports of Chinese private military companies protecting national interests, it seems that many States are increasingly employing the non-state actors of private military companies to pursue essentially neo-colonialist and geo-strategic objectives in theatres as diverse as Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Indeed so many south Africans were emigrating to fight against Alongside this there are also private sponsors of military ventures for ideological reasons or personal gain.

Contemplating this has led me to the conclusion that this is something I would like to base my project around. The concept of corporations operating outside the traditional state system and control of national government whilst exerting very real physical power is both exciting and presents a great deal of issues. Furthermore, private companies with the capabilities of a nation state operating across borders seems to me like an issue custom made for the transnational historical approach.

In undertaking this project there are a variety of new skills which I would like to explore and develop. I think it could be potentially very useful to map the theatres in which these companies have been acknowledged to operate against the country of their origin to see the correlation between states’ geo-strategic objectives and private military companies operations. This would help in both seeing why there is a large growth in the use of military companies as well as seeing to what extent nations in contrast to private employers are the main proponents of the private sector. I also would like to asses the origins of these military companies, what motivates people to fight for companies rather than their national armies? Where do their skillsets come from? I’d welcome feedback, suggestions and thoughts on how I could further apply transnational ideas and the transnational model to this area!

Reading Transnational Lives this week I stumbled across Shellam’s ‘Travelling Knowledge in Western Australia’s Southwest’. Her article dismantled the ‘binary’ model of ‘power and passivity’ assumed to characterize 19^thcentury indigenous-European relations in Australia by charting the career of Manyat; an Aboriginal man from King George’s Sound (an ocean inlet on the south coast of Western Australia) who assisted with the European exploration process in the Southwest. I live roughly 216 miles north-west of that inlet in Bunbury, a quiet coastal city situated roughly 105 miles to the south of Perth. Being able to visualize that same Australian terrain Shellam described in her article really encouraged me to read on. 

I should admit that Shellam’s account really heightened my awareness of those pretty serious misconceptions I held about British-indigenous exchanges in the colonial south. Not all ‘transnational’ (Indigenous-European) relationships in the colonial Southwest were characterized by violence or shaped by European racism. 

In 1832 (just two years after the establishment of the Swan River colony in Perth) Manyat was asked to join Scottish doctor Alexander Collie as a guide on an expedition roughly 50 kilometers north from King George’s Sound into the Porrongorup mountain range. From that year and until his retirement, he served as a guide on several more expeditions that traversed Australia’s Southwest region, and even worked as a mediator between indigenous groups and white settlers.

I think Shellam’s description of spatial or ‘travelling knowledge’ as a commodity whose worth was mutual to European and Aboriginal societies was her most interesting point. She emphasized the similar values attributed to ‘transnational travelling’ by British and Indigenous peoples. In both Aboriginal and European cultures, travel served to support local ‘knowledge economies’ and functioned to provide social prestige for the explorer. Collie’s expeditions took him from Scotland to those same Aboriginal ‘nations’ that were foreign to Manyat. Both were ‘transnational’ voyagers. Collie acquired the same type of ‘fame’ that Manyat received for his moving beyond the borders of his indigenous society.   

‘Travelling knowledge gained high currency in the Aboriginal knowledge economy where such information was a valuable commodity, as it was among nineteenth century naturalists and metropolitan savants who traded in natural history objects and anthropological information’.

There are a couple of things I took away from Shellam’s piece which I think might help me as I move forward. First, (and building on our discussion about the importance of the ‘national’ in the ‘trans’) her work speaks to the possibility of applying the transnational lens to spaces and times where the ‘nation’ cannot be understood to have existed in any ‘modern’ / Westphalian sense (pre-federation or indigenous Australia for example). The relationship between Collie and Manyat could certainly be described ‘transnational’, though not fashioned ‘above’, ‘below’ or ‘across’ any particular sovereign territory. I think there is some value then in prioritizing the ‘trans’ over the ‘national’.  

I also think her work highlights the value in using anthropological perspectives to explore transnational relationships. Collie’s exploration was made possible as much by the ‘culturally defined process’ of colonial record as Manyat’s ‘cartographic mind’ in which maps had been ‘danced in story and ceremony’. Reconstructing culturally informed ‘ways of thinking’ is surely crucial to the understanding any ‘transnational’ relationship.That’s something I hope to keep at the forefront of my mind as I continue to practice transnational history in the future.

So I got started on my project early, because the proposal is due within two weeks of two psych assignments and the short essay for this class. My original topic idea was that I wanted to do something about romantic relationships across national and cultural boundaries. My initial idea was to focus on marriage mainly because this is a more concrete search term than “romantic relationships”, still I feared my idea was too broad and vague. I tend to be a overly big picture thinker and that’s a habit I’d like to get away from.

So I started to think about concentrations of transnational marriages or romantic relationships, I was still thinking about this when I went out to dinner with my friend Gemma. Gemma is a neuroscience student, and she’s brilliant, but she is not an expert in history and doesn’t know the jargon. This makes her a good person to bounce history ideas off of to make sure they make sense. I was telling her about my general idea, and then I had a more specific idea, that I don’t remember having before I said it. This actually happens to me a lot. I’ve always thought in words, back when I was little I used to narrate my life out loud. Sometimes I think by talking, rather than talk by thinking, even if I’m just talking to myself.

Anyway my idea was to explore the lives of the women in the Ottoman Imperial Harem. Their relationships to the Sultan did not often involve marriage and were often far from romantic, but they still had that contrast between personal bonds and wide cultural separation that I wanted to explore. Plus I’m kind of obsessed with the Ottomans. Aside from my fascination with Islamic art, what I find interesting is their abnormal (at least from a western perspective) power dynamics. Aside from the Sultan the empire was mostly administered and influenced by slaves or former slaves. People who were simultaneously powerful, and at the same time often powerless outsiders. What is especially interesting from a transnational history perspective is that these elite slaves were often born outside the empire or on its periphery, but slaves were used so heavily by the imperial court because they were thought to be loyal only to the empire and to the ruling family. It is surprising that these people were assumed to be loyal to an entity that owned them, and in many cases directly kidnapped them, or was allied with their kidnappers. It is even more surprising that they usually were loyal to this empire. Although perhaps those were disloyal never attained elite status.

One question I want to try and answer with this project is wether they also retained loyalty to their homelands. Their is significant evidence that they did. Murat Iyigun an economist has actually done a statistical analysis of wether a sultan with a european mother was less likely to attack Europe. He has concluded that they were, but he claims this was mostly due to the way the Sultan was raised not the actions his mother took a court. In addition at least one mother of a sultan did seem to encourage better relations between the Ottoman Empire and her native Venice.

I’m currently trying to decide on a more precise approach to the project and that brings me once again to the question of scope and scale. Should I also discuss eunuchs? How many women in the harem should I focus on? Should I focus on just women whose sons went on to become sultan? Only ones who bore the official title of Valide Sultan? What time period should I focus on?

I’m currently leaning towards a more personal approach after reading about transnational lives for this weeks tutorial. Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700- Present is honestly a delightful read. I really like stories and I want to be able toe examine some of this fascinating people in greater depth. In addition I think I want to write my short essay on “What makes a life transnational?”. The main possible issue with taking a more in depth approach with just a few individuals is that these are not for the most part people whom have had lengthy biographies written about them, so I may have difficulty finding enough detail.

The sheer scale and ambition of transnational history initially seems to restrict the potential of the individual as a level of analysis. Though an essential part of what we can conceive as being ‘transnational’ in character is the individual human actor, individuals are but one in a list of forces from ideas, institutions, capital and language (to name a few) that cross national boundaries. The temptation to go beyond the nation as the central unit of historical analysis can run the risk of losing sense of the complexities and impact of people and events at a local level. However, thinking about the readings done so far, it seems that a key benefit to doing transnational history is the potential to interweave the individual and the transnational in historical analysis.

Beginning her article Defining Transnationalism, Patricia Clavin uses the example of the German Jew Julius Moritz Bonn, and his diverse life experiences – as an agent in the League of Nations, a professor in several countries and a travelling propagandist – to demonstrate that transnationalism is ‘first and foremost about people’. The patterns of his life symbolised the ‘cosmopolitanism of the inter-war period’. Yet Clavin also points to how individuals do not merely symbolise transnational history but also shape the nature of transnational events, people she refers to as ‘somebodies’. The potential impact of individual agency features in her discussion of ‘border crossings’ and her reference to Aida Hozic’s article detailing how merchants in nineteenth-century Europe were able to exploit the western Balkans as a ‘dual periphery’ for illegal trade –  resurrecting old routes from the late Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires (Hozic, 2006: 244).

The individual also has a unique and flexible role in relation to a central issue/theme of transnational history – and that is how to address the ‘nation’. Transnational historians have clearly differed in the extent of their abandonment of the nation-state framework, partly influenced by the subjects they are researching. The cultural approach to transnational history in particular has found it difficult to shake off the national container, with trends like ‘glo-cal’ history showing how individuals engaged in international relations and foreign policy naturally ‘reflect the culture of their nation-state’ (Clavin, 2005: 437). Jan Rüger’s article on the development of the OXO meat cube further shows this in how certain key people like Lord Hawke made the previously transnational character of the product an increasingly British one in the run up to 1914.

It is in this context where transnational history has further benefited from the insights of other social sciences like political science. Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on nations as ‘Imagined Communities’ comes to mind here. Though in name this work seems to be another quintessential 20^th century nation-centred historiographical account, in offering an account of the nation as a cultural construct he was able to show how local communities defined aspects of their nationalist movements through transnational influences, Creole groups being particularly relevant in this context.

Initially we can see how tempting it can be to situate the ‘individual’ as a cog in the larger machine of analytical frameworks of space and scale used by transnational historians. However, in its focus on the ‘go-betweens’ of an increasingly connected modern historical landscape, the forces which flow between and within established constructs like the ‘nation’ or ‘empire’, transnational history can use the individual to its unique advantage. Individuals clearly do have agency in reality to shape transnational outcomes, they are certainly affected by them as well, and lastly, we must not forget that they too have their own perspectives and conceptions of what was beyond the nation in their time.

An individual-centred analysis provides us as historians with a lot of difficult methodological questions to grapple with, yet so long as the openness of transnational history as a historical perspective remains (and doesn’t succumb to splintering), it also offers us potential to discover greatly rewarding insights that can help build the future of the field.

A perennial enemy of mine the last two and a half years at St. Andrews has been the Department of History’s word count limits, which are usually set between 1500 and 2500 words. I inevitably find myself tearfully saying goodbye to entire paragraphs the night before the due date because cutting anything else would be even worse. In the most severe cases, I stay awake until the wee hours looking for new and inventive contractions that will get the word count just a little lower.

This is all my fault, of course. One of the biggest issues I have had with my writing is that I usually bite off more than I can chew, using too wide a geographic, temporal, or topical frame for the amount of space I have. For example, last semester I attempted to write about Justus Lipsius’ legal legacy with the initial scope being Western Europe, Catholicism+Calvinism+Lutheranism, and the period from 1550-1650. By the time I finished the paper, it was much less ambitious (though much tighter and focused) with the scope being limited to Catholicism and Calvinism in the Low Countries, France, and Spain in the 1575-1625 period.

With that in mind, the limit of 5000 words for our project would initially seem to be greatly freeing. Yet I have the feeling that properly framing the project and accurately scoping out geographical and temporal limits will be just as important, if not more, than it was the past few years. Transnational history imposes no geographical limits on what we (the students) can focus on, and the term “late modern” in our course description is open to a degree of interpretation.

In any case, we have few natural guides as to where we should draw boundaries, geographic or otherwise, in our research and writing. In addition to concerns about word count, we also have to consider that we do have limited time to work. Taking too broad of an approach to research might sacrifice a certain “depth”; a 5000 word paper about American interventionism globally between 1900 and 2000 is likely to be inferior to a more in depth paper about American intervention in Central American between 1910 and 1940.

All this makes it imperative that we be honest with ourselves about both the limits of our writing and research abilities and the limits of ink and paper. 5000 words may seem like a lot, but I have a feeling that by May (If I’m not careful) I’ll be contraction-hunting once again.

In #week 2 we introduced you to a few books on transnational and global history. One of them was Sebastian Conrad’s (Free University Berlin) What is Global History?

There is now a new podcast available via “History & Theory” with Sebastian Conrad around global history, its evolution, critics, fields, and perspectives. Via Soundcloud.

In #week 2 our final speed-writing exercise included a postcard to Granny. Grappling with the openness, alleged lack of definition, this is what we wrote.

Dear Granny,

greetings from sunny St Andrews. This semester I am doing a module on transnational / global history. It is all a bit confusing at the start but essentially…

-Transnational history is an approach to history that includes forces, actors, ideas, commodities, networks, and movements ranging across boundaries on a variety of different scales.

-Transnational history is the study of the human and material connections in between and amongst places in the past.

-Transnational history is the study of relationships, networks, and movement between people, ideas, goods, and capital over national, regional, and continental boundaries. This can take multiple forms, incorporating diverse methodological and ideological approaches.

-Transnational history is history that affects more than just one nation and where the main subject is not a nation. Transnational history is especially useful for studying networks ideologies and ideas that have effects that are not just in one country. It is also useful for studying how cultures, nations and the people within them are networked together.

Back to the library now. No YouTube or Facebook for the next 4 hours.

Best wishes, MO3351.

When I was in school we never did European History. In elementary school we explored the history of concepts like writing and numbers. I remember carefully marking a clay tablet in cuneiform. When I switched schools in 4th grade we started to do a lot of American History. 6th grade was Ancient Civilisations from the Mayans to the Ancient Chinese, Rome and Greece were covered, but I don’t remember anything about Western Europe. In 7th Grade we did world geography, that involved a bit more European History, because we had a unit on each continent. In 8th grade it was back to American History, which since I’m from Lexington Massachusetts tended to be very heavy on the revolutionary war and sort of gloss over the rest. In 9th grade I took World History, it was as Matthew Connelly puts it, civilisation du jour, not Eurocentric or ethnocentric, but once we got passed the development of agriculture there was no cohesive narrative. In 10th grade I took Advancement Placement World History. I loved that class. Towards the end it became more like global history or even the history of globalisation. We essentially only explored the late modern world in terms of relationships across vast distance. We learned about the Opium war, but nothing about English domestic politics during that time.

That class is also where I probably first learned the word Eurocentric. The class had obviously been developed as a response to earlier more Eurocentric curriculums. I had never experienced a truly Eurocentric curriculum, but that is when I came to realise that most of the adults around me had. My mom is a scientist, but I’ve been a history geek since age four, and she never minded hearing me yammer on about it. She was really surprised by a lot of the stuff I was learning in World History, especially about science done outside Europe. She actually became fairly frustrated with how Eurocentric the history curriculum she had in school was, because she felt that she had been deprive of relevant information.

In 11th grade I took yet more American History, East Asian Studies and Political Thought. Political Thought was my only truly Eurocentric class before uni, and many of the students actively complained that Confucius wasn’t given his due.

In my education prior to uni, Europe was effectively provincialised. This never seemed that abnormal to me. I didn’t go to school in Europe and about 40% of my classmates weren’t of European descent, so it made sense to me that the curriculum did not focus on Europe more than anywhere else. Some would probably criticise the education I had as an example of rampant political correctness, I wouldn’t. Although not having done European History has certainly proved inconvenient at St Andrews.

When I came here to St Andrews, my first history module was Scotland Britain and Empire (I had to reverse some classes because I also do psychology). That module was honestly a bit scary. I went into it very self confident, after all I had supposedly already done two years of university level history classes in High School. I was wrong to be that confident, it was a genuine struggle both to get my writing up to the appropriate level, and to go from a global perspective to a national and European one. Many of the Historians whose work we read this week discuss the struggles of turning away from European and national history, I would say that switching towards it is equally hard. I think this means that the European perspective should maybe not be viewed as more intuitive or natural.

You are ten, maybe eleven weeks into your final semester of sub-honours-level history. And, although the town has been left feeling curiously post-apocalyptic after weeks of snow, ice, and bitter pensions disputes, you’re clinging to your last few tutorials as if they are all you have in the world. You check the time on your phone. You should probably get going.

It’s the time of day again when, as usual, you find yourself checked onto that strange and constant conveyor belt of students, beginning somewhere close to ALDI, that trundles slowly along Largo Road towards the roundabout (which, after a heated discussion with my housemates, I am forced to conclude is probably better known by its proximity to the Whey Pat than by its looming mediaeval gate), there to widen and scatter its many passengers into the older, prettier, and pricier heart of the town.

You make it to St Katharine’s Lodge with a minute or two to spare.

Your tutorial passes surprisingly quickly for class with approximately three surviving students in it. In the last five minutes, you turn to the number of next week’s reading and are pleasantly surprised to find Global History printed across the top of the page. Well, you suppose at the very least it might be a little more outward-looking than the Whigs, whigs, and the whiggish.

You flip through the section— it’s narrow enough, some small print, but nothing completely monstrous that jumps out at you. What about the readings? You recognise Christopher Bayly, maybe one or two others. But there are no three-hundred-word article titles, no indecipherable jargon, and nothing longer the thirty pages including endnotes. All in all, not a bad lot.

And then the hammer blow.

If you were hoping for more of the transnational side of things, read Jan Rüger.

Okay. Fair enough. Who’s Rüger?

It’s a really interesting microhistory. He looks at the history of the OXO cube and sort of uses it to…

We’re going to be reading about stock cubes. Right.

I never thought I’d find myself sitting at a computer trying to contrive a metaphor adequate to frame the friendly stock cube as a hard and bitter pill, but suffice to say, I wasn’t terribly excited about it.

And then I actually read it.  

One year later, I’m enrolled onto a transnational history module, and Jan Rüger appears on the reading list. If you would like my review, in a sentence?

I read it again.

And I looked forward to it. Because in that strange, witty little article, there is a wonderful amount to learn, and not only in its material and human examples: of a Bavarian inventor and a shrewd founder with a host of transnational connections, of Uruguayan cattle meat purchased at a third of the European price and an idea which might never have been realised without the cashflows and credit of the powerful London stock exchange.

No, there is not much extraordinary about the story of OXO, in a world which Rüger himself acknowledges was rapidly learning to connect the dots between its various human and natural resources, scattered across the globe, often in ways that were controversial and destabilising.

However, there is plenty that is exemplar in the historian’s approach to the topic: his engagement with the meaning of transnational history, by neither excluding nor privileging the national story, which he shows us constitutes only one dimension of the OXO example (though still an important dimension if we are to engage critically with the concept of nations at all) is the most obvious example.

Finally, and I would suggest most importantly, Rüger reminds us that it is important, as we discover new ways of looking at our world, not to become too embroiled in our conclusions to make the same error as more traditional approaches that we often come to frown upon.

Ask new questions, yes. But as we advance in this new field and refine this new approach, let us not lose sight of the old questions and approaches. Let global historians engage with microhistories. Let transnational historians continue the study of nations, incidentally or otherwise.

For clearly, this is the surest way to generate a conversation between newer and older histories. And surely that, most of all, is what keeps our discipline alive.

I have yet to find any clear definition of transnational history, and perhaps this should come as little surprise. The ‘angle’, ‘way’, ‘perspective or ‘response’ of transnational history is relatively new: not just to me, but the wider academic community in general. 

Is the lack of definition problematic? Can ‘transnationalists’ agree on the nature of their ‘perspective’?

To tackle these questions, I turned instinctively to my ‘bible’ – the sixth edition of John Tosh’s ‘Pursuit of History’.^[1]An absolute must have, in my view, for anyone attempting to negotiate HI2001, or the scope of historical enquiry more generally. Tosh’s work provides several chapters (‘Mapping the field’, ‘The uses of history’ and ‘Historical awareness’ for example) dedicated to explaining the various subdisciplines of history.  

As far as know, Tosh does not term his work ‘transnational’. A well-accomplished historiographer however, I thought it useful to weigh his take on transnational history against those insights provided by transnationalists like Patricia Seed and Chris Bayly. 

From Tosh’s description, I took what I found to be the three most important features of this new and exciting discipline. First, that it provides a basis for challenging the national paradigm of historical analysis, primarily by illuminating the global ‘networks’ that have shaped aspects of national development. Second, that these transnational ‘networks’ function at sub, supra and inter – national levels. That is to say that they exist below, above, in-between or across nations (as a ‘full range of contacts and influences from abroad’). Third, that transnational history does not discriminate with respect to the ‘types’ of ‘network’ it seeks to explore. 

Turning next to the 2006 AHR review (particularly with respect to those comments on the ‘distinctiveness of transnational history’) my concern about the problem of ‘doing’ transnational history without a clear definition of the field changed. I found Tosh’s description echoed those provided by the six contributors. Beckert’s account of transnational history as skeptical of what he termed the national ‘enclosure’ resonated with the idea of decentralizing the national paradigm. The frequency with which terms like ‘across’, ‘movement’, ‘interpenetration’ and ‘flows’ appeared in relation to the idea of transcending national boundaries was analogous to Tosh’s idea of extra-national forces determining national development. Appadurai’s ‘space’, or (better perhaps) ‘spaces’ of ‘the flows’ was / were certainly comparable to what we might be able to describe as ‘levels’ of transnational interaction (above, below and in-between the nation). It seemed as if there was a good deal of consensus on the character of approach after all.  

If I could then describe ‘transnational’ history, might it look something like this?

‘The study of those extra-national or national historical forces that have moved above, below, between and across national borders’.    

I liked the idea of using ‘forces’, instead of targeting ‘people’ or ‘goods’ specifically. It left scope for more natural energies (disease or climate change for example): those also capable of moving across national borders at different levels. The idea of using ‘movement’ also appealed to me. ‘Flow’ seemed to imply linear or one-sidedness direction. 

I’m not quite sure of how fruitful this self-invented exercise has been to the reader, but I do now (fingers crossed) have a much stronger understanding of what transnational history can involve. 

Back then to the original questions I posed at the beginning of this entry (I’ll work backwards). I do think there is a general consensus on the ‘nature’ of the transnational perspective. Some of the more nuanced expressions however (‘forces’ rather than ‘networks’ for example) that can be used to describe the focus of that perspective itself, might well be subject to contest. As to my first question, I’m ironically beginning to appreciate the lack of a clear-cut definition. It affords the potential for massive, perhaps untraditional analytical scope (something that may serve me well further down the line during the progression of this module). 

Admittedly there are still some issues I would like to resolve. Does transnational history seek to understand the flows that shape nations, the nations which shape the flows, or both? Am I right in thinking that the discipline can incorporate ‘natural’ rather than exclusively ‘man-made’ ‘forces’? Does it examine the movement of these ‘forces’, or their reception in different / exclusive national contexts? 

^[1]Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of history(London, 2015).