MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we watch Sait paddle away from the Dutch, we reflect on how his life became entangled with the large-scale structures and themes historians enjoy analysing. His life and, eventually, his (spoiler!) untimely death all occur within the context of Dutch colonialism and a war between the Dutch and the Chinese. Overall, his experiences and interactions with colonialism and war undoubtedly shaped his worldview, his reasoning, and his actions up until his very last breath. Altogether, this story serves as an exemplar for the ‘global microhistory’ that Tonio Andrade believes historians should focus on. I came away from this week’s readings with the impression that ‘global microhistory’ is a way of practicing and doing transnational history that grounds abstract concepts, like ‘war’ and ‘capitalism’, in the experiences of ordinary individuals. Because of this grounding, global microhistory becomes relevant and personal to us, and this is what makes it engaging. Reading twenty-odd pages seems like a chore to most students, myself included, but I tore through Andrade’s article like it was nothing. I wanted to know what happened to Sait, and I found it so cool to think that his experiences had greater significance and meaning than what we see at a first glance.

But ‘coolness’ isn’t a good enough reason, on its own, to pursue global microhistory. Sure, a global microhistorical approach is relevant and personal to the reader, but so what? Why does it matter?

Without microhistory, global history is essentialising. In arguing that the world is tied together with universal experiences of It does not account for local specificities, and for In order to answer this question, I turn to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. De Sousa Santos argues that knowledge in the world is dominated by a ‘Western hegemony’. This Western hegemony presupposes that there is only one way of knowing and perceiving the world. Instead, de Sousa Santos argues that there are ‘ecologies of knowledge’, or more than one way of knowing and perceiving the world. This is because knowledge is not a Platonic form that simply exists, or an objective ideal that we strive to achieve and accumulate an infinite amount of. Knowledge is ‘situated in the world’, and is an ‘intervention-in-reality’; a way of seeing, in a nutshell, that is determined by our cultural context and our own experiences. And, because our ability to know is defined by our individual experiences which, in turn, maps onto the way we interpret and see things, the amount that we can know within our own way of knowing is limited. We can only begin to see ‘beyond’ our framework is by understanding other ways of knowing. Then, by comparing a multitude of different frameworks with each other, we can acquire a broader, more reflective knowledge that doesn’t just understand the world, but also understands the limitations of human knowledge overall. Overall, de Sousa Santos argues that we need to think of the world as consisting of different ‘epistemologies’, or modes of thought. This framework allows us to account for subaltern epistemologies: other conceptions of the world that conflict and differ from Western ones.

Ultimately, de Sousa Santos’s work answers the ‘so what’ question and gives us a reason to support global microhistory. In assuming that experiences of ‘capitalism’, for instance, are universal, global history isn’t just essentialising. It is also promoting a singular, Eurocentric way of thinking about the world. If multiple ecologies of knowledge, and thus multiple ways of seeing the world exist, then this means that there is no one kind of structure and theme that ties the world together – no one ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, ‘neoliberalism’, or ‘war’. Thinking that there is only one kind of structure is deeply-essentialising and Eurocentric. As such, it would be wrong for a global historian to employ a wide-scale approach and make sweeping generalisations about the world. It is not good enough to say that ‘x was affected by capitalism’. Instead, de Sousa Santos tells us we must examine the way capitalism was imagined in the minds of individuals, and how these affected their perception and experience of history overall. We also ought to compare the way in which capitalism conflicts with and fits into each locality’s unique epistemology.

Overall, global microhistory can help us respond to de Sousa Santos’ criteria. By employing global microhistory as a methodology, the historian is given a way to address big structures in relation to the epistemologies and experiences of localities. Of course, someone might object to this and say that this methodology is too demanding and, thus, too idealised. Sure, it’s natural to want to write history without making sweeping generalisations. But asking the historian to alter their own mode of thought to understand someone else’s epistemology? That’s a big ask. Nevertheless, I think that global microhistory paves the way to writing a history that analyses the world from different perspectives and modes of thought.

Carlo Ginzburg’s highly acclaimed exploration of the life of Dominico Scandella (popularly known as Menocchio) – a sixteenth-century miller – is the first thing that jumps to my mind when thinking about Microhistory. It is one of the best examples of an individual life from a specific locality being linked to broader historical themes, namely the religious intolerance of the Counter-Reformation and the productive interactions of high and low culture in pre-industrial Europe. Given my familiarity with this text, I thought it could be interesting to approach it from the fresh angle of transnational history. How effectively does Ginzburg track the circulation of ideas that contributed to Scandella’s transgressive and convoluted cosmology? How does he bridge the gap between the local and the global, the specific and the general? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to answer in this blog post.

The blurred boundaries between elite and popular cultures is one of the most important themes of the book. Menocchio was a miller living in the Friuli region – a rural part of Italy. Seen through the lens of traditional categorisations, he was a lower-class citizen, a proletarian. His cultural background was heavily determined by peasant oral tradition. Yet his complex cosmology, which included surprisingly progressive views such as the toleration of other beliefs and the differentiation of the spirit and the soul, were undoubtedly influenced by the humanistic literature he came into contact with. The confluence of these different cultural influences translated into strikingly original views expressed by Menocchio during his trials, demonstrating the productive interstices between high and low culture. By working backwards from the trial transcripts to the texts known to have been in Menocchio’s possession, such as Bocaccio’s Decameron, Mandeville’s Travels, and Il Sogno del Caravia, Ginzburg attempts to trace the journey of ideas, from origin to interpretative expression. The edifice of Menocchio’s ideas was built from the ‘stones and bricks’ drawn from his selective reading, and held together by the mortar of his peasant logic.

The dangers of broadening the implications of Menocchio’s case to include his historical peers are obvious: Menocchio was atypical, a recluse, shunned by many (including his family) for his unorthodox views, and therefore unrepresentative. Parallels and patterns can only be drawn from such an unusual case study with great caution. Menocchio demonstrates that ideas did circulate, crossing class boundaries and spawning new ideas, but gives no indication of the extent to which religious paradigms were being questioned at the time. It’s a tough one. Writing a story about an average citizen, living an average life with average ideas and average achievements does not make for a very spicy tale. Taking the more marketable path by writing about an exceptional figure, however, makes it hard to draw links, to ground the story in the reality of common experience.

Is this just another angle from which to consider the local/global, specific/general problem? Even the most average story will include certain details that make it unique. But that particular uniqueness emerges from outside influences, a configuration of reality resulting from connections, networks, transitory ideas and artefacts. To unpack these, the historian must look beyond the local. The specific/local is but a compound consisting of multiple elements of the general/global that happened to come together in a specific spatio-temporal context. The historian must become a scientist. The compound must be broken up into its composite components. To do this effectively, working backwards seems to be the key; like Ginzburg’s tracking back from Menocchio’s testimony to humanistic ideas that achieved global circulation, the local must be used as a doorway to the global. Microhistory is therefore a valuable entry point for the transnational historian.

On 19 November 2018, Carlos Ghosn traveled aboard his private jet from his vacation home in Beirut to his family home in Tokyo. The journey should have been a routine one for Ghosn, a then CEO of both Nissan and Renault and the first person ever to be at the helm of two fortune 500 companies simultaneously, but upon landing he was caught with surprise as Japanese officials placed him under arrest for questioning with allegations of embezzlement and false accounting. That same day, Nissan announced that Ghosn had been removed as CEO and dismissed from the company entirely. Media reports claim that Ghosn had stolen tens of millions of US dollars from Nissan by means of a shell in order to purchase homes in Rio de Janeiro, Beirut, Paris, and Amsterdam, and New York as well as fund dozens of lavish vacations.

Under Japanese law, Ghosn was able to be held for 23 days without any criminal charges being filed against him and thus without bail. At the end of this period, however, Japanese prosecutors charged Ghosn and one of his associates with “underreporting of deferred compensation”, a charge which although not serious, allowed him to be held for another several weeks without bail. This process continued until Ghosn’s arraignment on 8 January 2019 when he came out publicly for the first time since his arrest to claim innocence and plead for bail. Once again, though, Ghosn was denied bail. It was only in March that Ghosn was finally offered a bail of nine million US dollars with the agreement that he would remain under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance with no internet access, but was arrested once again after tweeting “I’m ready to tell the truth.” Finally, in April Ghosn posted bail and was allowed out on house arrest, marking 108 days since he had first been detained and four months since he had been allowed to see his family. During his time in Japanese custody, Ghosn was allegedly at times kept in solitary holding, denied his lawyer, and violently interrogated—all of this without ever being convicted of a crime.

On 30 December 2019, over a year after his initial arrest, something extraordinary happened. Ghosn escaped his house, disappeared out of thin air, and reappeared in Beirut the next morning. In a statement released to the New York Times, Ghosn said that he would “no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant and basic human rights are denied,” and that he had not fled, but “escaped injustice and political persecution”.

Though there are many theories as to how Ghosn was able to escape to Beirut, they are not important to this course. Rather, what is relevant about Ghosn is his identity as a transnational criminal because of not only his refusal to adhere to the rules of one country, but also because of his unique background. Ghosn was born in Rio de Janiero and spent the first years of his life there before moving to Beirut. There, he studied at French schools before moving to Paris for university. After graduating as an engineer, Ghosn worked for Michelin Tyres in both France and Germany before being appointed as an executive of Michelin South America in Rio de Janiero. Soon, he was promoted to CEO of Michelin North American division and moved to Greenville, South Carolina where he spent several years raising his family. Finally, Ghosn moved to Japan to aid in a merger between Renault and Nissan, eventually becoming CEO of both companies and staying there until his escape in 2019.

While one does not necessarily need to ever leave their home to participate in transnational history, Ghosn is in many ways the embodiment of the transnational citizen and businessman. Moving constantly throughout his life, Ghosn learned to speak four languages fluently, secured three citizenships, and bought property in seven countries. As we have seen in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, there are many people who have lived this ‘transnational life’, but what makes Ghosn interesting to me is not his background, but rather his ability to leverage it along with his influence to reject the Japanese justice system and secure freedom.

This week I was struck when reading by a number of considerations made within each article that I personally had not actively considered myself thus far in studying.

The first of these that I found interesting was the consideration between differences in the northern and southern hemisphere. As an area of divide, especially when considering imperial and colonial narratives, we are often sucked into a division between the east and west. While this East West divide is apparent, I found interesting to think more of a North and South division. When taking this consideration into the spread of people and ideas and movement I find myself thinking more about the effects of different climates, traditions and cultures and languages, all things that meant that the people and communities in these areas developed completely differently from how we have. While I believe the east-west divide will still always hold a place, the North-South differences will now create a new area of consideration in my studies.

Something else that I found interesting during the reading was the consideration of the development and impact of penal colonies on transnational and global developments. Although something I have always been aware of, studying the penal colonies of the British empire is not something that I have done in depth. When I think about it, it makes complete sense that they would have had a massive impact on the development of the communities that grew from these colonies. What I don’t think I had fully considered was the extent to which many of these would have becoming a melting pot, filled with people from many more cultures and communities from around the empire than even some trading ports may have been.

I have always been interesting in the travel and movement of people. This idea of a forced migration and how people adapted and influenced a communities development I find particularly interesting and am definitely considering researching further to maybe eventually use this area as a broad theme for my coursework going forward.

This past week, I spent some time researching ideas for my short essay when I found something that really made me reflect on the methods and concepts we have been learning so far. 

I knew starting my research that I really wanted to write about the historiography around Transnational History and Gender History in Latin America (or Iberoamerica). From what I have seen so far there is much less development on the field of Transnational History in Latin America when compared to Europe, the United States or Asia. I also haven’t really gotten the chance to study Latin America in university almost at all, there are no modules in either History or IR (the other half of my degree) which focus on any country/countries in Central or South America. It is also deeply personal to me, I was born in Spain to Brazilian parents, and grew up between Madrid, Buenos Aires and São Paulo – whilst always attending an English speaking school. The way that I experience Latin identity and culture is inherently transnational, so there was no better starting point for my research project. 

The first article I came across is an article by Michel Gobat, titled The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy and Race. Out of all the things this article could have focused on, I would have never thought before reading it that it focused on the history of the term “Latin America”. Gobat explains how the term emerged in the mid 19th century, at a time when the continent was attempting to distance itself from U.S. and European Imperialism and also find a common identity for its people. 

In the early 1800s citizens of the region referred to themselves as Americans, or Americanos. Slowly this term become popularised in the United States, and both the North Americans (who viewed the South Americans as ‘less white’) and the South Americans wanted a new term to highlight their cultural differences. America then became Spanish or Hispanic America. This new  term, which did recognise a common culture and language  was too tied to Spanish monarchical rule at a time where the continent prided itself in independence, it also excluded Brazil, the region’s Hegemon. There was also turn in U.S. expansionism post-1848 towards the Southern Hemisphere as the U.S. tried to create the idea of of a common American Identity, but one which believed on the North’s responsibility to dominate the ‘lesser race’ of the South.

The term ‘Latin America’ emerges as a response to all of these problems, yet it is not as simple as that. Gobat presents that there were two discourses regarding the term at at the time. There were those who constructed the term in opposition to Anglo-Saxon influence, and believed the term to include all races as long as they were Catholic and Spanish/Portuguese speakers. However, another group, came to identify the term ‘Latin’ exclusively with whiteness – they saw the whites in the North as descendants of the Anglo-Saxon’s and the whites in the south as descendant of the ‘Latin’ countries, Spain, Portugal, France and Italy. They knew that the north regarded them as belonging to a ‘lesser white’ and more effeminate Spanish race so they aimed to create a ‘more white’, more masculine, Latin race (perhaps this is the beginning of ‘macho’ culture in Latin America, but that story is for another blog post).

The term was set up to differentiate the white elites of the continent from the African or indigenous inhabitants, in this case, it was a term to separate identities rather than unite them. A term which aimed to combat U.S. and European domination was also set up to uphold colonial standards. It was a term to combat white privilege but to also enforce it, which demonstrates the anxieties around race and identity in the Americas at the time. 

I am glad to say that with hindsight, it was the first discourse surrounding the term which stuck. ‘Latin American’ today encompasses all of the people who have their roots south of the Mexican border – it is a term which today indeed does unite us, and a term which many have fought to be able to say proudly. Articles like this not only demonstrate the relevance of Transnational history in exploring the origins of something so ‘simple’ as a name, but also how Transnational history can help us uncover hidden gender, racial and class biases that have been overlooked which help us better understand the experiences and identities of those around us. 

At the closing of last week’s seminar, we discussed the word “transnational” itself, and whether people prioritised the ‘trans’ or the ‘national’ parts of the word. Personally, I like to emphasise transnational history’s ‘trans’ component over its ‘national’, but I found it extremely interesting to learn that there were some who preferred its ‘national’; I wonder whether my interpretation and emphasis will change by the end of the semester.

This week’s readings gave us even more concrete examples of how the framework/methodology of transnational history can be utilised. I chose to read the selections from Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present as I was curious to see how transnational history could be explored through the medium of biographies (or how biographies could be explored through the medium of transnational history). The introduction provided another useful outlook of how the authors intended to use the transnational framework to tell their stories, stating poignantly, “Lives elude national boundaries; but biography the telling of life stories, has often been pressed into the service of nation, downplaying its fleeting acknowledgement of lives lived in motion” (p. 2). I love the idea of “lives lived in motion”, I think it greatly exemplifies what transnational interpretations are here to represent and emphasise.

Looking at the first chapter by Martha Hodes, which explores the life of Eunice Connolly, a wife of a sea captain from the British West Indies, I was reminded of Milinda’s critique on the OXO essay, as Hodes used the framework of transnational history alongside a feminist investigation that was not explored in the OXO essay. This chapter in particular was helpful as it served as an example of how one can use other schools of historical thought or lens alongside transnational history. Hodes also discussed the challenges she experienced while writing: the challenges of writing a narrative that was both local and global, archival gaps, and proving the historical significance of Connolly’s transnational life. Her admittance of these difficulties exemplifies the challenges of transnational writing, but Hodes’s self awareness allowed her to delve even further in her analysis.

I most enjoyed chapter 15 by Penny Russell, and her analysis on Jane Franklin, who reached across borders to appeal for the search of her missing husband and his crew, who had gone on an arctic exploration and failed to return. There was a lot to unpack in Franklin’s story, where Franklin herself “blended her appeals to universal female sympathy, the bonds of the ‘civilised world’, the ties of a cosmopolitan scientific community and the special interests of nation” (p. 205).

Although I am still not sure about what direction to go in for my final project and imminent first essay, this week’s readings certainly gave me insight to the possibilities, and have given me a lot to think about.