After initially looking at the project proposal and the possible range of ideas I had for my final topic, I realized my main two ideas for the extended essay were actually closely related. First, I wanted to analyse the rates of repatriation for guest (temporary) workers that operated in migrant systems across the whole of the Atlantic. Second, I conceived of a topic that centred around the importance of transnational companies (EIC) of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and their employment of temporary workers and migrant labour.
As I examined these two topics closer, I began to take notice of the similarities between these two topics and how their points of comparison could translate into an expansive project idea. Primarily, I began to see the migration systems of the 19th century as the central period for analysis and, as such, would be wholly concerned with the world the British Empire. Giovanni Gozzini attempted to explain the reasons for the development of large migratory patterns across the Atlantic (and the Indian and Pacific as well). Where Gozzini peaked my interest was in his distinctions between indentured labour and slavery. As he demonstrates, the impetus to see indentured servitude as a continuity of slavery is unwarranted. Listed as the reasons were: “the migrants’ conscious and voluntary signing of long-term contracts hiring out their labour, to the relative improvement of sea-travel conditions”.(gozzini, p. 322) à This statement, supported by mortality rate’ss considerable decline over late 19th century, is testament to the establishment of firm migratory patterns over multiple generations. As Gozzini explains, an initial cluster of movements between two regions creates a self-sustaining network of information, money, and migration over a period of time.
Finally, this gets me to my [supposedly more] refined essay topic: Something along the lines of à How did long-established migrant systems affect guest worker’s desire to repatriate to their mother country (or remigrate)?
My initial thoughts on this question were primarily directed at the comparing the usage of indentured labour in the Americas compared to its usage on the opposite side of the Atlantic. As this will no doubt produce a confusing and vast picture of immigration in the Atlantic world, I will then attempt to look at the success of return migrant workers in the indentured servitude system to that of the guest worker system which developed later in the early 20th century. Of course, these two very similar programs will make finding clear breaks much more difficult. However, I believe it will be in my best interest to utilize the micro-analyses of multiple macro-connected countries and regions in order to paint a picture of how and why repatriated workers from India were so resolute in their plans to return home compared to those of Russia. Moreover, it will shed light on the failures of certain countries to support their own workforce as well as helping me determine the usage of strategic migrations vs (un-strategic?) or (out of desperation) migrations.
While doing reading for my upcoming project on the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, I was struck by something in particular: a glaring lack of information on the subject. One would think that there would be plenty of sources to be found on such a demographically significant period in history. In the singular year that the influenza raged worldwide, it infected 500 million people and killed between 50 and 100 million of them. The death toll, even at its most modest estimate, exceeds that of World War I (15.9 million) and is on par with that of World War II (50 to 80 million). No corner of the world was left untouched, whether it be the trenches of Europe, the Samoan islands, or even the arctic villages of northern Alaska. Hartford, Connecticut, where my parents work, was almost completely shut down.
In this university’s library, there are upwards of 100 books on World War I. There are under ten on the influenza, and even less are focused on the 1918 pandemic. These books, like those on the bubonic plague, are shelved in the medicine section. I then tried to research the pandemic by way the time period itself, not necessarily the disease. In a 600-plus page book literally titled 1918 (Gregory Dallas), the same year that three to five percent of the world’s population succumbed to influenza, the disease doesn’t even merit a full page. Why?
While searching the general disease section, I was struck by a passage from Andrew Nikiforuk’s The Fourth Horseman. Nikiforuk quotes Catholic philosopher Jacques Ellul’s depiction of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (from the Book of Revelations) as central to history itself: ‘“all history depends on them and there are only these forces in history.”’ Nikiforuk interprets the first horseman as representative of God; the second, as representative of war and power. The third and fourth are more sinister: the former represents famine, whereas the latter is both pestilence and death. Nikiforuk argues that it is the Fourth Horseman that is the most significant, citing the empires and armies flattened by disease and the changes in social attitudes and structures. He then points out the strange willingness of people to forget this: ‘…we don’t like to think that we are a part of history anymore, or that we are walking memories of past plagues.’ In short, those living today much prefer to think of plagues and epidemics as nasty relics – problems people faced only in the absence of modern medicine and cleanliness. Others have indirectly shared his view; Terence Ranger and Paul Slack, for example, note a predisposition for epidemiological history to be ‘Whiggish’ in nature in their Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence. Historians have had a history of portraying disease as something increasingly vanquished by modernization and therefore less relevant today.
This is exacerbated by the fact that disease is often very difficult to explain: the virus causing the 1918 pandemic, for example, was only discovered in 1995 and completely identified in 2005. Historians for most of the twentieth century, therefore, would have seen the pandemic as something unpleasant, unexplained, and irrelevant in a modernizing world. It’s not that there isn’t primary information on the flu – countries tend to be pretty good about tracking how many of their people are dying – but rather for a long time, it seems, nobody wanted to use it. While I don’t think this will hinder me too much on my project – in which I will (hopefully) track the disease’s progression along transportation networks – it is certainly striking and, I think, unjustified.
Sea of Poppies is a historical novel written by Amitav Ghosh, and is an intriguing study into opium trade, and how it affected the Indians who were involved. It also focuses on indentured servitude of Indians away from the subcontinent and towards islands such as Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad. The book is labelled under the Ibis Trilogy, named after the ship that transported groups of people away from the Indian subcontinent, and focuses on the East India Company and their cultivation of opium in India in order to profit from trade with China. In my study on the East India Company for my extended project, which will be looking at how the British utilised foreign relationships to benefit their association with India, this book seemed to crop up in numerous sources and I thought that it would be interesting to consider in a blog post.
“Opium Financed British Rule in India”, says Amitav Ghosh in an eyeopening interview with the BBC.
The book, crucial in our study of Indian history during the East India Company, is inherently transnational in nature. The Ibis, which is the ship that these many cultural groups meet to travel to Mauritius, becomes a transnational space that seems to cloud the definitive boundaries amongst the varied groups of people. The people who board the ship include an Indian female villager (who escaped from ‘sati’), A French woman, an African-American freedman, an Indian landowner and a half-Chinese convict. Paulette, the French woman, refuses her European heritage to embrace life as an outsider, a foreigner. She therefore disguises herself as a Brahmin, and establishes a connection with the other women on board. This demonstrates the fact that nations and borders did not necessarily play a significant role in the forging of alliances.
Ghosh, it is argued, uses untold stories: “The coolies who inspired ‘Sea of Poppies” didn’t have that power [to inscribe]… they didn’t leave diaries behind; after all, they couldn’t even write. So where does that leave those who would tell their stories? Ghosh is forced to imagine them, based on the limited sources available, but he does so with the instincts of an anthropologist more than a novelist…Ghosh obviously wants to make the novel a literary excavation, digging up the stories of people lost to history, but in the process his characters themselves often seem like artefacts.” While it is widely considered a novel, not a microhistory, it can be argued that this book is rather historically accurate in its approach to understanding the atmosphere around the major fictional characters. Ghosh, for example, “read the description of the great Sudder opium factory at Ghazipur…by the factory superintendent, JWS MacArthur,” and therefore “creates an encyclopaedia of early 19th century Indian food, servants, furniture, religious worship, etc.”
Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies
Photograph: Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies
In our readings a couple of weeks ago, we discussed Fernand Braudel’s comment on how an imagination is a historian’s most valuable tool. However, Ghosh is not a historian. To what extent can we treat his book like a microhistory? Can we treat this representation of coolies in rural India, and peasant workers who worked on opium farms as an accurate representation of the Company’s influence in the country? Personally, I find that this book is vital to my study of the East India Company, and approaches a rather dark subject within Indian history in an engaging and intriguing manner.
As I sit here contemplating my project proposal, I have come to wonder exactly what my specific 5000 word essay should be on? There are a number of avenues I would like to explore, and I have decided to settle on Africa. However, this hardly narrows down my search, as now I begin to question where should my focus lie.
While conducting my research I came across the Happy Valley Set in Kenya. A largely Aristocratic group of hedonists who lived in the Wanjohi Valley between the 1920s and 1940s. As I delve further into their adventures I find that the Happy Valley Set were entangled in a life of mischief and murder. One notable member of the group, Kiki Preston was named ‘the girl with the silver syringe’ because of her penchant for cocaine and heroin. Preston had numerous affairs with the British aristocracy, including Prince George, Duke of Kent, and was subsequently banned from meeting with him after she introduced him too to drugs.
I find the lives which the members of the Happy Valley Set to be particularly interesting. Yet for my project I would like to focus further on the wider picture of colonial settlement. The hedonism of the Happy Valley Set will be just one of the issues I will explore. Of particular interest to me is the interaction between the locals and the settlers, despite a largely negative picture being painted of the relationship, and the racism which ensued, my research last semester regarding Anglo-Indian relations revealed that a codependent relationship existed between the Indian employees and the British employers.
The British aristocracy is an interesting angle to take, their lives in Britain were structured by rigid formality, yet those who came to the colonial outposts of Africa seem to have let go of their inhibitions and taken to a life of hedonism. The impact this had on the legacy of the British is one I would like to look into further, and understand whether the British had an overall negative or positive impact on the country. It is easy, in hindsight, to look back and look at a society taken over single handily by European influence, but it is important to understand the benefits that empire had. The impact of women, and the lives which they led, such as that of Kiki Preston are biographies which I would like to look into. Perhaps then, my project will take on a micro-history approach…
The British in Africa is a lesser explored topic in colonial historiography. There has been a large focus on the Indian subcontinent, and the mark which the Empire has left. However, Africa too has a long history of colonization which has been slightly overlooked. It garnered much attention after the Scramble for Africa during the late 19th century, but in my opinion has been largely overshadowed by the British in India.
My essay has not been sufficiently narrowed down by my research stated above. I still need to condense it down in a chronological order, and formulate a question. Although, the benefit the extended project has given me is the freedom to conduct my own research and formulate my own argument.
I’ve been kind of running with one of the ideas that I put forward in a previous blog post, about how art is inherently transnational. And specifically, I’ve been pushing towards the idea of a project proposal rather than an essay.
So try this on for size:
On a very basic level, Shakespeare is clearly at least a passive transnational actor. His most famous works are set in a diverse array of locations – Venice, Cyprus, Verona, Athens, Rome, Denmark, to name but a few. But on deeper analysis, there is certainly more to it than that. His influences come from across the European continent – particularly from the Italian peninsula – and it would seem that he actively sought out these foreign setting and influences in his work (Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange: Early Modern to Present, edited by Enza De Francisci, Chris Stamatakis).
In a country that is increasingly reaching inwards, defining it’s hard borders (link to stuff about N.I. atm), I think it’s important to consider that one of our most important cultural figures was incredibly outward facing. But more than that, I don’t think it’s enough to just note that down and remember it. I think it’s time to do something about it – to remind people, to show people. Hence the idea for my final project proposal.
Hey look guys we have the same hair!
It’s simple really.
Take three of Shakespeare’s most outward facing plays, trace their origins and routes across borders, and then take them on a transnational tour around the European continent, before doing so would require getting a working visa for all the members of the company. Because saying that Shakespeare was transnational is one thing. But showing how transnational his work still is, and still can be, is something that can have a real, lasting effect on how at least some people understand the importance of transnationalism across their lives.
In this sense, I will be understanding transnationalism and transnational history from the perspective of fluid borders, approaching Shakespeare’s work (and, by extension, art as a whole) as something that cannot be defined by its own national influences, but instead must be seen as deriving from a set of dialogues across multiple borders. I will then be presenting some of Shakespeare’s work in a similar context to emphasise these origins, and to demonstrate the importance of keeping these transnational avenues and dialogues open in order to make top quality art.
So yes, in a sense, this is a bit of a love letter to the EU. But I mean, who can blame me?
#remoanerandproud
The shows that I’m thinking of are:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Set in Athens, with clear ties to the Italian style of commedia dell’arte (Italian), and British traditions of fairies and fairy stories. Also, a loose link to the Ancient Greek myth of Theseus and Hippolyta, and the Italian love story of Pyramus and Thisbe.
A Winter’s Tale – Less so in origin than in plot, the play itself is actually super transnational. It takes place in a dialogue between the kingdoms of Sicily and Bohemia, and is about the micro-level interpersonal exchanges between them. Movements between the two are very fluid.
Twelfth Night – Set in Illyria (the Western Balkans), the show begins with a shipwreck, and sets up a constant micro-level exchange between Illyria and Elisium. This also draws on elements of commedia dell’arte (Italian), with more traditional English clowning techniques too.
I’ve also found two fantastic books on the subject – listed below – and anticipate finding a fair few more as research progresses. One final note, I am considering only working on one of the plays, rather than presenting three in a trilogy. It would mean that I could focus on that one play in more depth (I would probably pick A Midsummer Night’s Dream) but I am uncertain yet.
Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange: Early Modern to Present, edited by Enza De Francisci, Chris Stamatakis
Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, edited by Robert Henke, Eric Nicholson
In one of our readings last week by Tonio Andrade, one part particularly stuck out me and is worth quoting in full.
‘There are stories out there waiting to be told, traces in the archives that can provide individual perspectives on the great historiographical issues that are the core concern of our discipline. Perhaps as you read this, you’re thinking of one. Please tell it. Let’s bring the history of our interconnected world to life, one story at a time.’[1]
Inspired by Andrade’s call to action, I thought that I would respond by telling a story in my blog post this week!
The events begin on 3 May 1945. The Allies had just captured Berlin two days before and the German soldiers were retreating, though the fighting was not yet over. Importantly for the Germans, they held several French VIP prisoners which they could use as ‘bargaining chips’ to secure a better peace deal with the Allies if the War was lost.[2] They kept these prisoners at Castle Itter and under very tight security to prevent them from escaping.
A picture of Castle Itter, where the prisoners were held
Among the political prisoners held at Itter was Georges Clemenceau who was a former prime minister of France and advocated very harsh terms against Germany for the Treaty of Versailles. In addition, the Germans held Albert Lebrun (former president of France), Francesco Saverio Nitti (former Italian prime minister) and Andre Francois-Poncet (former French ambassador to Germany). Not only were there just political prisoners, but they also held Jean Borotra who was a French tennis legend, winning 13 singles and doubles Grand Slams (including Wimbledon 5 times). These prisoners, however, did not often get on well as they were often political rivalries. For instance, Lebrun frequently quarreled with some trade union leaders living in the castle and refused to sit with them at meal times.[3]
Georges Clemenceau was among those held captive at the castle
The castle was guarded by soldiers under the command of Eduard Weiter, but events were soon to take a sharp turn. Owing to the inevitability of defeat, Weiter decided that resisting the Allies was hopeless and so decided to shoot himself.[4] The radically changed the situation and caused the guards at the castle to fear for their lives and abandon the castle, leaving the VIP prisoners alone and unguarded. Upon discovering that their fortunes had changed, the prisoners took control of the castle and seized all the weapons. Unfortunately though, escape would be futile because the surrounding woods around the castle were swarming with loyal German soldiers. For the time being, the prisoners would have to remain put in the castle until the area was cleared of German soldiers.[5]
The possibility remained that these German troops would eventually go back into the castle and keep the prisoners under guard. Moreover, the prisoners also heard that the Germans executed 2,000 prisoners at Dachau just before they left the camp, so they feared that they may meet a similar fate. So, one of the workers at the castle, Zvonimir Čučković, a Croatian electrician, decided to take matters into his own hands and go behind enemy lines to try and reach U.S. regiments to ask them to help the prisoners escape from the castle.[6] Čučković made his way down the mountain to the town of Wörgl, though he did not know that the town was occupied by German soldiers. Would Čučković get captured and be forced to tell the Germans about the unguarded prisoners at Itter? Fortunately for him it turned out that the town was occupied by disloyal German soldiers under the command of Major Josef Gangl, who recently joined the Austrian resistance movement.[7] Čučković’s work was done. He had informed Gangl about the prisoners who needed help in the castle, so Čučković then made off for Innsbruck where he would be safe.
Major Josef Gangl helped organise the rescue of the prisoners at the castle
The problem was that Gangl only had about twenty soldiers, so was not really in a position to launch a rescue mission to the castle. Gangl then went searching for some American regiments who might be willing to help him out. Eventually, he stumbled upon a regiment led by Lieutenant Jack Lee and approached him with a neutral white flag. How would Lee react? Would he be skeptical of Gangl’s information, seeing it as a trap laid out by the Nazis? Lee decided to believe Gangl and agreed to launch a rescue mission to the castle.[8] They then both made their way to the castle to try and get the prisoners to safety.
Lieutenant Jack Lee helped Gangl with the rescue operation
Upon arrival, though, the prisoners were markedly ungrateful. Expecting a large battalion of tanks and a few hundred men armed with machine guns, they were instead met with just a single Sherman tank, 10 American soldiers and 14 German troops.[9] Not only that, but there would not be enough vehicles to move the prisoners out of the castle and hold off any German attacks.[10] To add to that, German men heard that the prisoners were still in the castle and were being defended by an American regiment. Before long, the castle was under heavy fire, the Sherman tank was destroyed by an anti-tank cannon and Gangl got shot by a German sniper.[11] What was Lee going to do now, given that his defense seemed hopeless? One plan he had was to vacate the castle grounds and being all his men and the prisoners into the keep, in order to try and fend off the Germans for as long as possible, in the hope that reinforcements would arrive.[12]
Jean Borotra was a multiple tennis Grand Slam winner who risked his life to get support for the defense of the castle
Just as it seemed that all hope was lost, one of the prisoners, Borotra (the French tennis legend) offered to undertake a suicidal mission, in order to save those trapped in the castle. He offered to slip out of the castle, find American reinforcements and direct them back to the castle in order to save the prisoners and the American and German soldiers.[13] Lee agreed to this. When there was a lull in the fire coming from the attacking Germans, Borotra, disguised as an Austrian peasant, slipped out of the castle and made his way to Wörgl, where there were still American soldiers. Fortunately for those trapped in the castle, Borotra was still in extremely good shape from his tennis career and managed to outrun several SS soldiers on his way to Wörgl.
When Borotra discovered an American battalion at Wörgl, he managed to redirect them back to the castle. He knew where all the German roadblocks were on his way down to Wörgl, so redirected the battalion to avoid these. Now, just as the German soldiers were very close to besieging the castle, the battalion led by Borotra arrived just in time. The arrival of American soldiers as reinforcements scared the besieging German troops, who subsequently fled.[14] The castle was secure and the prisoners could then be escorted back to France and then released. Some of these prisoners went back into politics when they arrived in France and then went on to be extremely influential in French policy making in the next few decades.[15] Had they died at Itter, French politics might have turned out very different in the second half of the twentieth century.
So, then, what is the importance of all this? What really stands out to me is just how transnational all this is. We encounter a Croatian electrician helping out French and Italian prisoners escape from a castle held by German soldiers by finding disloyal German soldiers, part of an Austrian resistance, who then are helped by advancing American soldiers, with further backup being requested by a French tennis legend. Take a deep breath. It seems that national borders did not matter much when these people acted. It made no difference to the events whether, for instance, the electrician was Croatian, British, Spanish or Russian – he just wanted to help the prisoners escape. Similarly, the arguments between the prisoners had nothing to do with national differences, but rather political divisions. Thus, it seems that the events were not driven by national differences.
Another interesting theme in all this is that it is the only example of Germans and Americans fighting together in World War Two.[16] Without this obscure event, it would be so tempting to think of World War Two in national terms. Germany vs America. France vs Germany. However, by examining the non-state actors here, we can understand that actually these national conflicts made not too much difference in their lives. German soldiers were happy to fight for America against their own men and disobey commands from the Nazi hierarchy. Could we now think of World War Two as being a transnational war, where national differences do not matter as much as we think? I’ll let you decide that for yourself.
So, let me leave you with this. There are stories out there waiting to be told, traces in the archives that can provide individual perspectives on the great historiographical issues that are the core concern of our discipline. Perhaps as you read this, you’re thinking of one. Please tell it. Let’s bring the history of our interconnected world to life, one story at a time.[17]
By Tonio Andy-rade
[1] Tonio Andrade, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’, Journal of World History 21 (2010), p. 591.
[2] Bethany Bell, The Austrian castle where Nazis lost to German-US force, 7 May 2015, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32622651>[26 February 2018].
[3] Stephen Harding, The Battle for Castle Itter, 9/11/2008, <http://www.historynet.com/the-battle-for-castle-itter.htm>[26 February 2018].
[6] Donald Lateiner, The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers joined forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe, 21 March 2014, <http://www.miwsr.com/2014-024.aspx>[26 February 2018].
[7] Stephen Harding, The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers joined forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe (London, 2013), pp. 96-107.
In last week’s seminar, I was considering two possible project ideas. One related to the Silk Road, and the other related to the India-Pakistan partition. At this stage, I’ve done a bit of research on both these ideas, and will be talking a bit about each to consider which project would be better to pursue for my long project.
One of the projects which I was rather excited to pursue was the Silk Road, and how the British Empire utilised it in their transfer of goods, ideas and textiles across Europe and to Asia. However, this project might not be as feasible as I originally believed, as the Silk Road disintegrated after the fall of the Mongol Empire, and silk trade disintegrated after the collapse of the Safavid Empire in the 1720s. The Silk Road, however, is famous today due to the New Silk Road, which was brought about in 1966, after the British Empire had declined considerably. 1966 came after the independence of most of the British colonies, in exception to a few in Africa and perhaps Hong Kong. As a result, it would be difficult to find source material on how the British transported themselves across the silk road, as the route itself was not being utilised between 1720 and 1966. These were the years of the peak of the British Empire.
Photograph: “Stories From The Silk Road”, depicting the different cultures and peoples who came from different lands. Presented as an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Although doing a project on the British Empire utilising the Silk Road might be slightly futile at this stage, what might be particularly intriguing would be to consider how the British Empire spread ideas, textiles and goods across their colonies and to Britain,and how they utilised these goods. For example, it might be interesting to consider their spread of religion, with British missionaries advocating Christianity in certain colonies. For example, Professor Heather Sharkey wrote that “the missionaries played manifold roles in colonial Africa and stimulated forms of cultural, political and religious change”. The British, of course, failed to spread their religion in certain colonies, and it also would be intriguing to investigate why their missions failed in areas like Japan, but succeeded in Africa. Moreover, it could be interesting to consider how the British used spices from India, or silk from China and utilised them across empire. Of course, this would also look into migration, into how the British utilised the people of empire as well.
Thinking about this topic, it seems rather broad. For my project, I’d have to consider narrowing it down to a particular theme, such as the spread of religion, or the spread of ideas, rather than people. Within the spread of ideas, I could include religion, language, ideas of imperialism and nationalism. While I’m still unsure of how I want to pursue this, this would need a lot more research to become a more concrete essay question, and I’d definitely need to narrow it down some more.
I’m starting to sink my teeth into some sources that might lead me in a sensical direction for my project, and along the way I’ve come up with several new ideas and buzzwords. These discoveries all lead me to ask myself the same question, though: how do I tie this into transnational history–is it even possible? Right now I’m reading a book by Martha Menchaca called Recovering History, Constructing Race in which Menchaca approaches history with a ‘racial history’ perspective and methodology. Books like this tend to incorporate an ethnographic approach, and I like ethnography–I’d love to try to bring in an ethnographic edge to my project, but I don’t know if the result would be the piece of transnational history I’m looking for. Chicano’s live a transnational reality that gives them a certain liminal ‘otherness’, and this can manifest itself geographically if you zoom your scale in on the border and border studies. That being said, there is a rich cultural history that can be found here.
Let’s try to apply transnational history. Menchaca explains that the ‘Mexican American’s indigenous past is situated both in Mexico and in the Southwest [of the United States]’ (25). In addition (or perhaps because of this), migration is also engrained into their indigenous past, and in the case of Chicano indigenous identity, it differs from its Mexican counterpart–and it goes back to before the Aztecs.
The Mexica depart from Aztlán. From the 16th Century Codex Boturini. Created by an unknown Aztec hand in the 16th century.
Aztlán is a Nahuatl word which means “the land to the north; the land from whence we, the Aztecs, came.” There’s sort of a tension here, though, because this land, Aztlán, is located right (this is where it gets interesting and transnational, so bear with me)….
…here.
Seems complicated that It gets even more complicated. During the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in 1969, Alberto Baltazar Urista (Alurista, as he is known professionally) stated:
In the spirit of a new people…we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán, from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny…With our heart in our hand and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo* Nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the Bronze Continent, we are a Nation. We are a union of free pueblos. We are Aztlán. (cited in Rendón 1971:10).
From here we get the idea of the “Hispanic Homeland” and we have all of these Chicano organizations such as Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) (are these transnational organizations?). Believe it or not, a fair number people and organizations, particularly ones of Chicano descent and affiliation, actually want this land reclaimed as the Hispanic Homeland.
To me this looks like a potential transnational hotspot given the almost constant flow of people that dates back to prehistory, the existence of an identity that affiliates with two nations and ethnic backgrounds equally (at least in theory), and dispute over a giant piece of land and the nation to which it belongs.
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*A person of combined European and Amerindian descent (https://www.britannica.com/topic/mestizo)
Micro history gained prominence as a school of historical thought during the 1960s and 70s. It essentially seeks to attribute worldwide historical events to smaller, seemingly insignificant occurrences on a micro level. There is a great debate surrounding the effectiveness of this approach, and whether it offers a new insight into transnational history, or whether it is simply a lottery in deciding whether factors are actually important.
However, there is a tendency to believe that macro and micro history work against one another, instead of towards the same goal. Both seek to understand global events but so from a different lense. Indeed, as was discussed in today’s tutorial ‘how much use is a small map without the context of a large map?’. This question is particularly poignant was analyzing the usefulness of micro and macro historical approaches. Rather than working against one another, they work in conjunction and the evidence gained from both schools can be combined to formulate a sophisticated analysis of global events.
Heather Streets-Salter analyses the Singapore Mutiny of 1915 and suggests that its apparent irrelevance on the historic stage has arisen from the historical context of the time. The First World War, argued by Streets-Salter, has overshadowed the Sepoy Mutiny and consequently only a handful of historians have further inquired into the causes and consequences of the Singapore Mutiny. My problem with micro history is therefore this, that if historians take into account small details and extrapolate them into the context of larger world debates, then surely, they run the risk of imagining, or over exaggerating the significance of said event. Peltonens argument does well to recognize that ‘individuals or small places are automatically assumed to represent a microelement’. The danger therefore is that micro historians selectively pick areas that correlate to their argument, and use evidence that supports their argument while ignoring the wider picture.
Furthermore, another issue arising from today’s seminar, which is true again when defining transnational history, is the parameters within which micro history operates. Initially, the definition seems rather narrow, microhistory analyses history from a local perspective. However, what are the geographical limits of this angle? When does micro history become macro? Arguably large cities, such as London, are micro in the context of Europe, opposing, towns are macro in the context of the individual. Perhaps then, microhistory is relative and dependent on the ‘lense’ through which is it seen.
Does anyone else have a problem with the fact that these words are basically the same? And also like…so micro means small, right? Which means that macro means big? But then on a camera, right, there is a macro setting. And the macro setting is for taking photos of small things? So I don’t…like I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. Does anyone get this? Are camera manufacturers specifically out to mess with history under-grads?
I still don’t know.
I’m serious guys search the word ‘macro’ on any image search engine this is the kind of thing you’ll get TELL ME WHAT IS MACRO ABOUT THIS IT’S RAINDROPS IT LITERALLY DOESN’T GET ANY SMALLER!
‘Asking large questions in small places.’ Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture, p. 1.
It’s a classic – the go-to definition for anyone looking for an introduction to micro-history. And I think it’s quite good. Mainly because it’s much easier to understand than those other two words.
It’s self-explanatory, right? Reduce the scale of analysis, in order to draw wide and far reaching conclusion. So look at something micro, and then use it to talk about something macro. Use the micro to look at the macro. Micro and macro.
Wait, so does that mean we’re doing micro-history or macro-history?
I’m getting confused again.
Why not both?
‘A marginal or extreme [historical] case is in some respects typical of a larger area or a group, but in its extremeness differs from the typical case in significant ways’. Matti Peltonen, Clues, Margina and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research, p. 357.
Matti Peltonen seems to think that both makes a lot of sense actually. Perhaps one of the best things about micro-history is its ability to provide a unique keyhole view in to certain ideas, institutions, structures etc. It allows us to connect with actual lived experience and understand historical phenomena from an entirely different angle.
Microhistory provides a level of precision understanding that most other historical techniques simply cannot – and broader historical studies can benefit greatly from this level of depth. Of course, on the flip-side, micro-history generally works to place its studies within a broader historical narrative.
Both. Both? Both is good.
But this is a Transnational history module…
I’m getting there, I’m getting there.
It doesn’t get much more macro than transnational history, right? This is as big as it gets – the movement of people, ideas, goods, and generally things across borders and around the globe. So how on earth can two things that seem so opposed work together.
Well the error is in the assumption. Micro and macro are set up in opposition, but in reality they’re not actually that opposite. Especially in history. I’ve already spoken about how the two are fairly inter-dependent when it comes to their place in history. And I think that can be especially pertinent in transnational history.
I briefly refer you to ‘A Chinese Farmer’ by Tonie Andrade – a great example of how focusing on one individual, confined to the margins of history, can lead to transnational conclusions about connections and interactions between Chinese and Dutch people in Taiwan. But just talking theoretically for a moment – it kind of seems like transnational history is already in the trade of focusing on individuals in this way. By it’s very nature, the primary actors in transnational history are the people who move across historical borders, and the effect that movement has. These people aren’t necessarily famous names, they themselves aren’t operating on a macro level. But they’re part of a macro trend. And that means that studying and understanding them will be invaluable in trying to understand that trend.
So okay, maybe these two words are far too similar to be opposites. But then, maybe they’re not really that opposite after all.
When reading about transnational and microhistories, two thoughts came predominantly to mind. The first was on how one could reconcile history on what is seemingly its grandest scale with its smallest (and often its most irregular). At first glance, perhaps, microhistory seems almost an antithesis to transnational history. Transnational history calls to mind forces that cross borders, wider movements, and nations themselves (as elaborated on in our previous discussion groups, the term ‘transnational’ implies the involvement of the nation as a key requisite, although we have debated the validity of that assumption). Something that struck me when approaching this week and its readings on approaching microhistory from a transnational perspective is the fact that movement in rural and often even urban societies throughout much of human history was highly restricted: it seems almost silly at first glance to even think of applying the term ‘transnational’ to much of seventeenth-century England, for example. There may have been transnational forces at work, but the average farmer was surely unlikely to go or encounter anything beyond his borders. Anything else would have been a significant outlier. ‘Outliers’ do not at initially appear to work with transnational history.
However, the readings this week – particularly Matti Peltonen’s ‘Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research’ centered on examples of microhistory that were ‘outliers’ in one sense or the other. For example, he examines Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and its focus on one villager who went against tradition and religion, as well as Michel De Certeau’s La Possession du Loudun and its interpretation of the ‘possession’ of Ursuline nuns in the 1630s. Neither of these cases were commonplace in their respective historical periods, yet both showed a common theme: their respective societies’ reaction to the unacceptable. In this, perhaps, more is revealed about the nature of said societies than a general examination of the ‘usual.’This, therefore, could be applied to the transnational outlier as well as the sub-national or national one. I think, for example, of an event close to my hometown: the revolt aboard the Amistad, a slave ship that came under control of its cargo while off the coast of New England. Unusually, after capture, the slaves underwent trial via the US Supreme Court and were declared free after it was decided that they were acting in self-defence. To my knowledge, the liberation of slaves post-revolt in pre-Civil War America – much less their return to Africa – was unusual. Yet its ‘outlier’ status does in no way diminish its relevance when studying the slave trade and its disputed legality; in fact, I think that it adds to it.
A second key aspect of microhistory in relation to transnational history to me is the fact that it adds a more ‘human’ dimension to history. History is my favorite subject; it always has been and likely will always be so. This has confused many of my friends, relatives, and perhaps most of all my classmates in high school. They have always cited the same factors in their hate of the field: it’s boring, it’s just a string of dates, or names of long-dead politicians, or laws that no longer exist. I agree with them to some extent: dates, names, and laws on their own often seem abstract to the point of dull. Great forces – modernization, globalization – are certainly impactful, but it is on a small scale that history begins to get interesting.
Any of the microhistory readings for this week are excellent examples of this: both Tonio Andrade’s ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys; and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory’ and Heather Streets-Salter’s ‘The Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915’ focus on relatively brief events placed against larger backgrounds of colonialism and war.. Both Andrade’s and Streets-Salter’s works are clear representations of how one can perceive more about the global situation by examining the local. Yet what remains the most striking to me about microhistory is how such a perspective characterizes the people with which it deals. History is about people, after all – this is what differentiates it from natural history or biology. Andrade’s and Streets-Salter’s works provide an excellent window into the different transnational forces of seventeenth-century Taiwan and twentieth-century colonial powers, but equally as importantly, they provide a fascinating window into human lives.
A Chinese Common Reader reading a book at a book stand
I remember doing a module on twentieth century China in year 10 at high school and noted the strong emphasis that my teacher placed on how the state strongly influenced what people read and thought. The primary sources that we were given were taken from the book ‘Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ and mostly detailed the literature and posters that the state gave for the people to read.[1] Further, we were not encouraged to think about questions such as whether ordinary Chinese people chose to read the literature they were given. Instead, we were taught that we must assume that people thought and read what was in line with the state because most of our sources come from the state.
Doing a module last semester titled ‘Migrant South Asia’ helped me to challenge this assumption that I was brought up with at school which was that the non-state actors had no agency. I learned to realise that the subaltern can indeed speak! However, up until last Friday I did not quite know if or how this might apply to China.
It was for these reasons that I found Joan Judge’s talk at the Global History Seminar last Friday quite fascinating. She discussed the various ways in which historians can try and enter the minds of the Chinese common readers and what was ‘common knowledge’ at the time. According to Judge, there are three main sources that historians can use to do so.
The first is by looking at books as objects which historians can use to understand the materiality of texts. Often these books were just cheap, string bound books which were used for gaining generic information. For instance, many of these were manuals for how to manage a household or how to write a good letter. In particular, her discussion of the uses of 萬寶全書 by ordinary people was very interesting because they claimed to contain a comprehensive assortment of ‘treasures’ that ordinary Chinese people could use. Everything they needed was supposedly in this one book.
Secondly, historians can look at the information in the books themselves to try and understand what interested the Chinese common reader. There were a wide range of interests that ordinary Chinese people had, such as how to get off opium and how to prevent cholera. It seems that the Chinese common reader sought out important information that could relate to their lives. For instance, some books instruct merchants on how to detect fake currency when dealing with foreign traders. What we see in these manuals are drawings of real foreign coins, which merchants could then use as a guide to check if the coin they received from the foreign trader matched up with the picture in the book. Interestingly, we can also see that some of these merchant manuals show little knowledge of foreign languages because the texts on the coins in the manuals make no sense. In fact, some of the drawings of coins have just squiggles in place of actual writing! Moreover, there seems to be little knowledge of foreignness because they simply referred to all foreign languages as ‘ghost speak’. Everything that was outside was seen as being ‘other’ and ‘strange’ to the Chinese common reader.
And finally, we can analyse the physical space where reading material was consumed. Most of the Chinese common readers got their reading material from book stands which were in the open in public spaces. Here, Chinese common readers would pay to stand and read a book at the stand. If they wished to rent or buy the book, they could also do so. I also really liked the point about why Chinese common readers chose to read books at book stalls rather than in libraries, even though one could read a book for free at a library whereas one had to pay to read a book at a book stall. Often there would be a complex procedure to get admittance into libraries of signing documents. It was far more convenient for Chinese common readers to pick up a book that they found interesting on the street and pay a small fee to read it. The image presented by Judge was that books were accessible and people could, and did, read books regularly. People read on the street, standing or sitting, and it this was part of Chinese culture at the time.
I especially liked the third section of Judge’s talk because it particularly links the idea of agency to the Chinese common reader. They could choose to read whatever and whenever they wanted; it was not a case of the state deciding what people should read. This is a truly transnational approach because ordinary people outside of the state could think as they pleased based on what they decided to read at the book stalls. I also think that because there was such a wide range of literature available to the Chinese common reader, they had a large amount of choice in what they decided to read. They would pick things that were interesting or relevant to them, regardless of what the state might have thought as being important for the common reader.
[1] Lincoln Cushing and Ann Tompkins, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (San Fransisco, 2007).
History is made up of microhistories. If you stand a distance from the tapestry, it might appear that the individual threads make up sweeping stripes –grand movements; irresistible forces— but upon closer inspection, it is apparent that each ‘thread’ has a story tangled with the stories of others. ‘Grand narrative’ is ultimately composed of a vast number of ‘small narratives’: history comprises the lives of individuals, their choices, their desires, their influences, their backgrounds, and nothing can remove that fact. To weave those threads together in such a way that the work produced by the historian matches the tapestry –of infinite complexity— of the past as it actually happened is the job of they who set out to historicise; it is an impossible task, but one whose original intent must not be forgotten. To lose sight of the micro is to ultimately find that one has a macro that is not history, but fantasy: it will inevitably be inaccurate.
Andrade, in his brief and very enjoyable microhistory of Dutch-Taiwanese espionage, concludes with the exhortation to his peers to ‘be mediums, to bring alive, just for a few pages, some of the people who inhabited [the past’s] structures and lived through those [historicised] processes’: ‘let’s bring the history of our interconnected world to life, one story at a time.’[1] Such an approach brings the past to life, but also to truth. The imagination that he acclaims and evinces in his work certainly injects into such a history a very winsome emotion, bringing it to life in the mind of the reader; the focus on the individual, and the attempt to reconstruct their pressures, responses, doubts and convictions, places back at the heart of history that of which it is ultimately comprised: actors. History historicises humanity; we must not forget that humanity is, after all, made up of humans. ‘A week is a long time in politics’, as the saying goes: equally, though, it can be ‘a long time’ for anybody, anywhere. The historian must recognise this— that actors are not ciphers.
Equally, however, its actors are not –are never— set apart from history. They are not subject to determinism— but they also make choices that are contingent: we must recognise that each actor has their reasons for choosing whatever it is that they do choose in any given instance. Walter Benjamin, Matti Peltonen comments, argued that a monad –that which, following Leibniz’s 1714 work, is a ‘living mirror of the universe’— can visibly fulfil such a function only when they have been ‘blasted out of the continuity of history’, at which point ‘their structure becomes obvious’.[2] I have to admit that I am not quite certain what Peltonen means by this. Leibniz, firstly, argued that a monad was the uniquely self-composed element of existence, such that its structure could never ‘become obvious’ due to the fact that it had no structure. Benjamin, meanwhile, would surely have been wrong to argue for something having been ‘blasted out of the continuity of history’; as outlined above, history is simultaneously a) composed of the ‘discontinuity’ consequent to multiple agencies (acting, I would however argue, according to the Hobbesian axiom of convenience), and b) the result of choices always contingent upon other occurrences: to look for elements discontinuous to a holistic historiography will result in either futile search or ahistorical fiction. This continuity/discontinuity tension is, so far as I understand it, the ‘double bind’ observed by Peltonen in his conclusion.
Whither, and indeed wherefore, microhistory, in that case? Peltonen, briefly surveying numerous practitioners of microhistory, comes to suggest that ‘the new microhistory’ could be ‘described as the study of the typical exception.’[3] If one is finding ‘typical exceptions’, I would suggest, one’s theory leaves something to be desired: it is either excessively specific and in its specificity inaccurate, or it does not pay sufficiently close attention to detail and thus leaves room for anomaly. There is, in other words, no such thing as a ‘typical exception’; or alternatively, everything is typically exceptional, recognising that there is also no such thing as either an ‘average individual’ from whom a microhistory can extrapolate grand conclusions on the macro level, or an ‘extraordinary individual’ ‘blasted’ from the contingencies of historical location. As a result, the sole ‘monad’ is, as Leibniz originally intended it, the individual actor.[4] Societies, and the other conceptual macro-constructs to which it is argued that microhistory ought (and is perhaps unable) to extrapolate, are made up of actors: actors are the strands of which the historical tapestry is comprised, and the anthropological flow of ideas, goods and all else would not exist without actors. Economists, Matti Peltonen notes, have the concept of the ‘microfoundations of macrotheory’.[5] So too must be the case for history. It is not easy –it may even be impossible— to weave together the necessary multiplicity of individual lives and choices to yield a full understanding of the near-infinite global flows omnipresent across humanity. Conceptually, however, it can be recognised to be at the very least highly advisable.
[1] Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory”, Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 573-591, p. 591
[2] Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: the Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research”, History and Theory, No. 40, October 2001, pp. 347-359, p. 356
The following blogpost will consider two aspects of our readings for Tuesday. First, I’ll be talking about utilising microhistory, and its many benefits in historical analysis. Second, I’ll consider the reading regarding the Singapore Mutiny of 1915, and will consider why certain histories are not studied in as much detail as others.
Microhistory in second-year Historiography was possibly one of the best units that came out of the module. We looked at differences between microhistory and historical fiction, and studying small individual cases (such as that of Martin Guerre) was absolutely riveting. As a result, I was rather excited to dive into the readings for this week.
Two of the most famous micro-histories in the world, The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis and The Cheese and The Worms by Carlo Ginzburg.
In “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys and A Warlord: Towards a Global Microhistory”, Andrade makes an extremely interesting point. He notes that the story of the mentioned Chinese farmer was absolutely insignificant to history- he wasn’t rich, powerful, and his actions were of no consequence to history in the long run. However, the author notes that the stories of such individuals is vital in our study of history. He claims that as historians, we should use these stories in a wider, more global perspective. Naturally, by looking at this through a slightly transnational lens, the microhistory that was being referred to in the article was especially interesting in its explanation of relationships over time. Before the war, Andrade writes, the Dutch and Chinese lived as friends. Taiwan was able to import goods from around the world (ivory from Africa, cotton from India, pepper from Palembang, etc.). It’s interesting to note that the story of this one individual, reserved for 350 years, was able to tell us so much about the social history of not only Taiwan, but of the Chinese migrants in Taiwan at the time.
In a way, microhistory lies at the very heart of history, as a concept. Micro-historians tend to look at individual stories, cases and small, often seemingly insignificant moments, and broaden the themes that are considered. Through this one article that was focused on one Chinese farmer, we learnt a lot of Dutch-Chinese relations at the time, the African slave trade, Dutch prisoners, and trade with the rest of the world. As a result, we can see that sucha small tale was retold in a manner where readers were able to learn a lot more about the society, politics and cultures surrounding the Chinese man’s story.
In “The Local Was Global: The Singapore Mutiny of 1915”, by Heather Streets-Salter, the author admits that the story- unlike that of the Chinese farmer- was documented well, and “has all the elements of a gripping human story, including intrigue, betrayal, passion, murder, racism, tragedy and panic (542).” The story was rather personal to me, as I’m from Singapore, but was a history that I had never read before. The author addresses the lack of attention, too, writing that it was not seen as crucial, when the event was considered against the world crises that were taking place at the time, during the First World War. I’m not sure if it’s fair to consider this history ‘neglected’, as I mentioned in my title (which was why I bracketed the word), but it definitely wasn’t studied in great detail as compared to the events of the First World War. Even schools in Singapore study international history, without delving into their own (relatively short) past as much. Our own school, for example, covered Hitler and Mao, but taught us nothing about Singapore during the wars. Of all the readings for this week, I found that this one was quite possibly my favourite. The author does not simply consider the causes of the mutiny in general, but she looks at international responses, spanning from British responses, to Russian and Dutch responses. Looking at it from a rather transnational perspective, this is particularly intriguing, to consider how news of the mutiny travelled across the world, and was received in different countries.
Scale is a term that is intrinsically linked to the processes of transnational history. With close links to that of micro-history, scale in the transnational perspective – another crucial component of transnational history – is centred on an inherent fear of monocausal and unilinear macro-explanations. In a sense, transnational historians often look for a so-called narrative order of micro-macro developments by altering the scales of analysis; ranging from a single family, to international, or cross-continental, entities. This focus on the particular scale that a given historian might employ is explicitly shown in reference to transnational historians preference to not use the nation-state as the “primary scale of analysis” (Struck, Ferris). In this regard, I am definitely a proponent of the transnational perspective. However, I believe that too many questions arise when considering the transnational historian’s labelling of nations and nation-states as the same entities.
Clearly, it is a historians obligation to look at a nation-state and observe the people and customs as conjoined with the aspects of the state (actual borders, institutions, administration). Yet, I feel that to regard the nation – the wider community of compatriots with shared interests & history – as essentially the same as the nation-state does the transnational discipline a dis-service. This can be explained with the use of analytical tools called Monads. The usage of monads (miniatures of the world around them) might help explain why and how a certain group, village, or town engaged in transnational processes. However, monads also work to explain that nations and nation-states are separated by two important factors, or are at least faced with two significant objections to the view of nation=nation-state.
Issues with scale – a nation and its people cannot be explicitly, or possibly even implicitly, defined by its borders and the institutions within the state boundary. Moreover, monads and their function as snippets of the larger issue (either regional, national, or global) often rely on the links between a community or nation. In turn, monads must be able to see beyond the nation-state if (as with the Jewish community) a peoples, or nation, is dispersed across borders. Conversely, monads must also be able to distinguish when nation-states, and all its real-life institutions, affect the transnational research. In essence, monads must be able to simultaneously use and ignore the functions of a state, not just disregard totally because of the distinction that nation=nation-state.
Linked to issue #1, “Continuity is based on discontinuity”. As Peltonen states, a timeline of continuity is dependent on the “exceptional events in a given monad”; they operate as the incarnation of discontinuity which directly affects/ ensures continuity. However, as with the issue of monads’ scales, “continuity is based on discontinuity” encounters problems of boundaries/restrictions. In particular, Walter Benjamin’s aforementioned phrase does not adequately explain how monads should be interpreted in relation to the nation, which has previously been shown to have difficulties with borders. As such, the question of a monad and its apparent disregard of the ‘stately functions’ of a nation-state depicts how certain historians might have skewed analyses as result of the disregard for the ‘state’.
These are but a few of the objections to the distinction that nation=nation-state. I suppose it is possible that I have greater difficulty accepting this transnational doctrine for my view of the world was always closely linked to belief that a nation and a state are two completely separate entities that work in conjunction with one another, but not always for the same reasons. A state, and thus its institutions and borders, must always have a clarity to them that cannot be seen in the nation. Even further, a monad might explain the larger processes of a certain people within a nation, but it might never explain the larger process of state-building or governance. – To be honest, this is pretty strong conjecture – Do you think a monad and its use of scales can be a precursor to explaining a nation-state, or simply just processes between similar (and different) peoples/nations? For me, a nation-state cannot ever be solely homogeneous, or represented by a monad. Yet, a nation can.
