MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

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).

Project Idea: What actually is the European Union?

Over break, I had the privilege of interning at the EU office in Washington D.C.  With the future of the EU up in the air; Brexit and the EU elections coming throwing curve balls left and right, the continent is sailing into uncharted political waters. With Britain most likely leaving the EU, member states have been forced to ask the question, “what are we actually doing?” Does being European stand for merely a geographic connection or is it a more substantial cultural and economic link? While interning at the EU, it was particularly interesting to see the diversity in the office, with the staff composed of Italians, French, Portuguese, British, and Czech colleagues all working together towards a shared goal. However, I began to wonder what this goal actually was. When the EU was officially created in 1993 (acknowledging the different European community organisations prior to it in the 1950s), the ambition was to form a shared economic and legal community in which laws and borders could be applied uniformly to all member states. While the EU accomplished this, it seems a larger entity was born from these member state alliances: a European identity.

Though some would argue they are more partial to their national ties than European origins, the case can be appropriately made that the European identity as of 2019 is in jeopardy. With Britain leaving individuals have been forced to question whether they are  for example, German or European? Noting that one can be both German and European, my point is that before Brexit, many people did not take issue or even think about the title “European.” If one lives in Germany, they are part of an EU member state and therefore European. However, now with the world changing at a fast pace these political decisions pose more personal dilemmas.  What does it mean to be European? Is it merely living in the territory? Is it cultural link? An attitude? An atheistic questions becomes a more cogent issue as the questions continually generate from each other.

My hope in this class is to do my final project on the EU identity. I think it would be really interesting and prove a beneficial exercise to trace the genealogy of the EU from its early ties in the 1950s to its more recent trials and tribulations with Brexit and even Turkey attempting to join a few years back. Why is it that Britain wanted to leave? Why were the member states so opposed to having Turkey join? Was it purely economic reasons or were their more subtle cultural qualms involved in the decisions? These questions have been weighing on me since my internships and I would really enjoy the chance to explore them further, bouncing ideas off the class through discussions and posts.

I plan to completely embrace the irony of an all American girl writing about European politics and identity.  While some will say I am out of my league and need stay in my lane, I think that studying Europe as an outsider might give me an advantage. For example, a European writing about the concept of European identity might have a better grasp of one’s personal connection to the alliance, but, they will unavoidably be harbouring a bias. Whether the individual is a supporter of the EU or sceptical of it, they will inevitably have opinions regarding what it means to be European. While I may still have opinions or inklings as to how others feel, at the end of the day I’m American and am not a member of the EU. Therefore, though I may have a bias within the realm of American identity issues, my bias cannot really extend into the realm of the European identity. So, this in mind, I think my quest to dive into the history of the European identity is one that is seasoned with optimism and potential.

My three main question I would want to focus on:

• The genealogy of the EU from 1950s ties to the present
• The different cultural, economic, and political factors that contribute to the European identity (what they are and why they matter)
• How the outcome of the current EU elections will affect the future of the global European identity.  

I am eager to hear everyone’s thoughts and look forwarding to learning about all the different projects going on.

The Institute for Transnational History (ITSH) will be running a number of events this semester including reading groups and workshops. We also have two QGIS sessions for basic map making and data visualisation running: dates are 25 February and 4 March, 3-5pm, Old Seminar Room (St John’s House, South Street).

As mentioned in class our www.transnationalhistory.net/mapping is a good starting point. For first hand-on practical advice, please do come along.

As an example what you may wish to do: Plotting Esperanto Congress Participants on a simple GQIS baselayer (here Cambridge Congress, 1907).

You can, to my mind, apply a transnational lens to practically anything. I remember jotting down a series of notes in the first seminar upon which I subsequently mused and wrote at length: of the possibility of historical axioms; of the contiguity of flow and networks; of the mental construction, Benedict Anderson-like, of nations and other anthropological entities. Patricia Clavin’s ‘glocalities’ supported these ideas early on, and reading Jan Ruger’s passing analysis of pre-1914 networks of Anglo-German relationships went some way towards confirming it. It appears that you can find such connections, and such vital relationships of contingency, between quite far-flung and, at first glance, seemingly discrete events, places, and people.

Take, for instance, the story of the phoenix. It was on my mind following the failure of CPR upon my previous topic: the idea of a new thing springing out of the ashes of the old is, I hope, one that will be exemplified as I resume my research. The area into which I was previously delving –the transnationality of human trafficking networks— was and is, as I said in the ‘post-mortem’ presentation, perfect for the transnational historian (laying aside the absence of sources and convincing scholarship). But really, what isn’t? Lux and Cook, whose essay on correspondence networks we read earlier in the semester, focused upon one man –Henry Oldenburg— and the way in which he remained stationary but nonetheless connected to thinkers across Europe. The ideas, in this case, were what were ‘in flow’: the conduits through which they moved, to use somewhat fanciful language, were the human nodes within an information network running on letters.

The ‘story of the story of the phoenix’ might be something similar; a brief glance at the Wikipedia page directs me to R. Van den Broek’s book The Myth of the Phoenix, a sprawling and densely-footnoted work that maps the appearance of the story as it surfaces in Greece, Egypt, Italy, France, Britain, and across the globe, seeming at times to die out but, fittingly, always returning. United within the umbrella of this research are such diverse thinkers as Herodotus, Dante, Isidore of Seville and Pope Clement I. This is not a history that calls itself ‘transnational’ –in 1972, the term wasn’t yet bandied about with such enthusiasm— but it nonetheless is one, or at least shares a large number of characteristics with other works of proudly self-identified transnationalism.

In these two examples –of Lux and Cook, and Van den Broek’s 487-page tome— we see instances of, respectively, a transnational history of intended, ‘formal’ networks of idea exchange, and of an ‘informal’ network of flash-points unified by a shared exposure to a single idea. The first spans a short period of time; the latter spans over a thousand years.

The great thing, however, is that ideas are by no means the only things that can ‘flow’, or which can ‘flash’. That’s been one of the major take-away points for me this semester. The interconnectedness of history has been striking, and has struck me more the more I consider it.

Where do I go from here? The question is doubly pertinent: firstly, where do I go for the rest of the semester –there are still five thousand words to be written— and secondly, where do I go with the ideas that I have gained in this semester, as I return to ‘conventional history’? The answer to the first question is still with the jury, who remain out. As I said above, I am of the opinion that practically anything can be viewed through a transnational lens, and I am tempted, for instance, by the idea of taking a single actor –as J-P.A. Ghobrial did with Elias of Babylon, or Jonathan Hyslop did with Gandhi— and examining their lives in such a lens, looking both at how they were affected by the networks in which they found themselves, and how they caused ‘flashes’ transnationally, by either their movements or the dissemination of their ideas. The 20^th-century Russian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is a possibility.

And secondly, how do I apply the ideas that I have been taught in this module to the areas that I will go on to study? It’s worth saying that this module has taught me a huge amount. It is easy to proceed with history according to a set of quite basic assumptions –that ‘different’ areas can be easily compared; that we can, at least for narratorial purposes, differentiate without too much difficulty between one place and another— but this module, and the thoughts that it generated, have gone far in causing me to question such premises. The interconnectedness of seemingly ‘different’ aspects and occurrences, where useful, is something upon which I will try to focus moving forward— alongside, of course, an elimination of those lazy assumptions and shorthands that have, as I have come to notice them more, increasingly bugged me.

In summary, looking back, I can say with confidence that I have greatly appreciated the module and the way in which it stretched me. I would, will, and already have, recommend(ed) it.

History in St Andrews had taught me a lot… Or so I thought. Transnational history is not a class that attempts to destroy or even discredit certain historiographical schools of thought and widely-acknowledged conceptions of history writing. However, Dr. Struck and Dr. Girardin made sure that I would never be able to look at well-established theories on historical writing in the same way again. Throughout this semester, I have grappled with the issue of networks and how agency is employed throughout these transnational routes between localities, nation-states, and across the world. Eventually, I came to understand actor-network (with help from Andy) as being a method for explaining the intricate nature in which actors create the network and the network creates the actors. This somewhat mutually-inclusive relationship helped me form the basis of my final project (with my focus on knowledge’s agency) – as you might know. However, when I first started to comprehend this theory in its entirety, I envisaged a different dynamic (quite separate to that of Andy’s seatbelt).

As I approached the topic of actor-network theory, I was struck by the ability of non-human actors to influence and even create transnational links between two places/regions. When I started to conceive of examples to illustrate this interaction in transnational terms, I placed non-human actors in a light of unwanted interaction. Now, I am not saying that Andy ignored the ability of un-wanted or un-intended consequences of non-human actors in transnational networks. Rather, my initial conception of non-human actors was that they were self-directing and did not ‘act’ at the behest of the human actors in these networks. Of course, this was an extremely limiting (and wrong!) view to hold. Nevertheless, my focus on the ability of non-human actors to contribute negatively to transnational actor-networks differed considerably to Andy’s image of the ‘desired intervention by  seatbelt alarms. Thus, I produced a completely different image to conceptualise actor-network theory as it pertains to non-human actors (i.e. of a merchant vessel encircled by blood-thirsty sharks on its way across the Caribbean).

In my scenario, sharks were seen to be hindering the advance of the small, unarmed merchant vessel across their overseas route. As previously stated, I initially envisaged the relationship between these non-human actors (the sharks) and human-actors (merchants) as a self-deprecating dynamic in this particular overseas transnational network. As sharks were seen to be part of the actor-network (although unwanted), I placed sharks at centre of the causes for the decline in prominency of network between two Caribbean islands. However, as I started to really analyse the potential effects of these sharks, it became apparent that this relationship was not self-deprecating but ‘self-enhancing’. In order to explain this view, it is imperative to think of any potential benefits that these sharks might have on this Caribbean actor-network. To name a few: 1) improved defences for the ship following this attack. 2) potential food source once they are well-equipped to deal with this issue. 3)greater knowledge of potential shark feeding grounds. 4)necessitated improvements to the ship itself (i.e. strenghtening hull, more provisions for blockades – bait for sharks).

All these factors would have had the positive effect of increasing the networks’ and, thus, the actors’ own security, self-reliance, and knowledge/understanding of the waters that they traverse. My initial conceptualisation of non-human actors in this dynamic  likened unwanted effects on actor-networks to something detrimental to the network. However, as I have shown, my thought process was flawed insofar as I excluded the true impact that knowledge of this danger could have on the survival and prominence of this actor-network. Of course, this line of thinking has arisen hand in hand with the progress I have made on my final project. I believe it will not only be helpful to include this in my analysis, but also it will be imperative to my final conclusions as well.