MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I opened the course handbook last week, I was glad see that the readings for our eighth tutorial really coincided well with my ongoing research. The aim of my project is to recreate and study the often-overlooked knowledge trading networks that existed between French and British scientists in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and until now I had been unaware of the quite specific approaches used by transnational historians to study agents and processes of cross-cultural transfer. Each of the key readings set for the week provided very useful methodological framing devices for my topic. 

The most valuable, in terms of my focus, was described in the article provided by Lux and Cook. The ‘weak tie’ approach to studying scientific networks that they advocated brought my attention to the importance of devoting more research to connections between less visible French and British botanists in the Antilles. The works of sociologists like Granovetter and Latour (to which I was previously ignorant) seem to fit neatly with the aims of my project: they hypothesized that scientific knowledge might circulate more effectively between individuals who are relatively less attached to formal institutions of knowledge cultivation. In sum, that ‘individuals with many weak ties’ to these institutions could be, and could have been, ‘best placed’ to diffuse new scientific discoveries. Thus far my research on Caribbean botany has been driven by a focus on ‘elite’ cultivators of knowledge who were stationed at state-sponsored institutions of science. My exposure to sociological theories of scientific networking has since however brought my attention to extending the scope of my reading to interconnections between relatively less elite cultivators of knowledge in the eighteenth-century; supervisors of private rather than public gardens in Jamaica and Saint Domingue for example. 

But I also took some very useful conceptual perspectives from Secord’s work on what he termed ‘knowledge in transit’. His idea of scientific information as a medium of cross-cultural communication stood out and made me think more about what might be describe quite literally as the science of diplomacy: the way in which eighteenth-century intellectuals in the Caribbean cultivated and selectively diffused the botanical knowledge they held in order to forge cross-cultural connections between Britain and France at the colonial periphery. Certainly, thinking about botanists in this light might strengthen my hypothesis that scientists in the eighteenth-century could serve a dual function as informal envoys and formal cultivators of useful knowledge. Frontier diplomacy between France and Britain in the Antilles might well have relied more on botanists than has traditionally been assumed.

I have a bit of a problem with Secord’s criticism of Sobel and hero narratives in science. First I should disclose that my mother is a scientist and a grew up around a lot of scientists. In fact my mom is an astrophysicist and knows Sobel. I’m not including any of this background info in order to brag, I just want to disclose both my personal knowledge and my bias. When I read Secord’s article as at home back in Boston. I commented to my mom as I was reading the article, “so this guy seems to have a real problem with Dava Sobel.” She asked why, I told her that I’d tell her later and I went back to the article. I think the main issue I had with the article as a whole is that it seemed to extoll the pursuit of historiographical perfection above all other goals in telling the history of science. The reason I have a problem with this is that history of science is something that should be understandable and interesting to the public, and also to scientists. My mom is a well educated person, but she learned the word historiography because her daughter is a history student. Most of the engagement a lot of her colleagues seem to have with the history of science is books by the likes of Dava Sobel. I’ve actually seen books like this have a concrete positive impact on the way scientists approach their own field’s culture and history. The conference rooms at my mom’s office are going to renamed after prominent astronomers at the university many of them women, because of Dava Sobel’s book The Glass Universe.

I’ve seen dinner table conversation among scientists shift to history, because of books by authors like Dava Sobel and Walter Isaacson. Do both these authors tend to have possibly oversimplified hero narratives in their work? Probably. But does that matter more than the power of their work to get scientists talking about the history of their field? I personally don’t think so.

I should mention that when I discussed the criticism Secord had of Sobel’s specific work on Harrison and Longitude, my mother agreed that Sobel had left out too many of the contributions of members of the Royal Society. However for her Sobel’s book had still been a valuable introduction to the topic and a compelling read although it was incomplete.

I also think that certain trends in historiography around science can be especially alienating to scientists. The idea that scientific ideas do not spread because they are true can make scientists dismissive of “those wacky humanities people”. Personally I don’t think that scientific ideas spread purely because they are true, but the truth of scientific ideas is a factor in both how they spread and how long they last. My mother made what I think is a good point, which is that science is constantly checking itself, and that a wrong idea is likely to disproven and dismissed by the scientific community eventually. While cultural factors around science should not be ignored treating scientific ideas as as cultural and un-objective as say literary ones takes this concept too far and creates an intellectual chasm between those doing science and those studying its history and culture.

Most scientists I’ve met in my life are naturally curious people who want to learn about their field and other fields, but many of them find academic history just as jargon laden and confusing as most historians would find a paper on neuropharmacology. My view is that history unlike science does not work if it is not understood and appreciated by those outside the field. Your doctor can still help you if you don’t understand the procedure, but the history of science will not help scientists better understand how their culture and networks could be influencing their work if they don’t understand what the historians are saying.

I’m aware that this is turning into a bit of a rant, so I will close with some things I liked in the history science elements of this week’s readings.

I liked the idea of travel as creating networks of information exchange. I’ve personally benefitted from this in semi symbiotic way. I get to go places to learn about history (as well as other subjects), because my mom is going their to strengthen her networks of scientific communication.

I thought the discussion of “simple men” being used as witnesses for science was interesting and was something I had not come across in history readings before. Even though I had not encountered this idea in readings before I have encountered it in reality. In fact for much of my life I have been the “simple man” for my mom and some of her colleagues, especially when I was a kid. I think both historians and scientists might benefit from employing more “simple man” techniques. Perhaps not “simple man”, but at the very least “person who isn’t directly in my field”. I think that explaining an idea to a person who is not an expert on that idea or the theory surrounding it, is a good way to test the truth and usefulness of an idea.

Short Essay title: To what extent has the study of visual culture enriched our understanding of ‘imperial history’?

As I’ve previously mentioned on these blogs, whilst I have never been particularly artistic, ‘art’ or ‘visual culture’ have always fascinated me as a window to how a certain time or place would have looked or felt like. In spite of this I have always been more comfortable with words. When presented with the option between ‘a project’ and an essay, I will hands down pick the essay every time. Furthermore – somewhat hypocritically – in the hierarchy of primary source material in my head, I would always place a textual source ‘above’ a visual source. Up until now, visual sources have only ever served to illustrate to me as evidence, a point raised by a textual source. So, before undertaking this Short Essay assignment, I found myself in this curious position where I was about to examine mostly visual sources for my Miss World project and yet still regarded them as accessories to textual sources.  

And apparently I’m not alone. Edward Said, who has done so much to inspire the analysis of visual regimes as part of the postcolonial project, once said he found himself “somewhat tongue-tied” when he had to talk about the realm of the visual.[1] Even looking back at my St Andrew’s historical career, I struggled to remember the few times when we were asked to analyse visual materials as primary sources. Why was this the case? If indeed the study of history is meant to help us understand the present, then how is it we have largely neglected this central part of our everyday lives?  

The more I researched for this essay, the more it became shockingly clear how visual our culture really is. According to David Ciarlo, “advertisements were seen by far more Germans than any colonialist’s talk on tropical hygiene or any museum’s painstaking ethnographic construction”.[2] This made me consider, for example, the quantity of advertisements I see on a daily basis; how many movies I’d seen this year; how often I used Google Maps; even how often I see the Queen’s face on a coin. Although I realise that we now live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by visual media, what really struck me was how frequent these encounters were and how little attention we pay to them. Studying visual culture opens us up to analysing new cross-sections of society, which may have previously been ignored and it is in analysing what these people saw that we might be able to discern how they saw.[3]  

However, the difficulty still lies in bridging these two together – the source and ones interpretation of it. Scholars are still grappling with the epistemological challenges of a ‘linguistic turn’ that called into question the meaning of words and language, so to challenge the limitations of images is going to raise even more questions than it answers.

Furthermore from my reading, if one thing is clear it is that we cannot apply the same tools of textual analysis to examine visual sources. Whilst scholars debated the methods of analysis themselves, they were all in agreement that the power of the visual lies in its disorder – that images capture something words can’t. It is precisely in the disorder of the visual that we are required to ask whether there are in fact elements of human experience that we cannot express in words.

It is in dealing with this existential crisis that I began to take visual culture more seriously and realised the monumental task that I have in front of me. I’ve never studied art history so I’m not too sure what they would think of my amateur visual analysis techniques or my infringement into ‘their’ discipline, especially if I’m likely to consciously or unconsciously borrow from my textual analysis techniques. I am treading on very unfamiliar terrain when I look at video reels and photographs and if Edward Said isn’t really sure what to do here, how on earth am I supposed to?

[1] Mitchell, W.J.T, ‘The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said” in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Bové A. Paul (Durham, 2000), p. 31. 

[2] David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany, (Harvard, 2011), p. 13. 

[3] Ibid., p. 17 

Over spring break, I travelled to Amsterdam and Malaga, Spain with a childhood friend. Amsterdam is one of the cultural capitals of Western Europe and had a prolific art scene throughout its history. I didn’t know much about Malaga before I arrived but I soon learned that while it is primarily a beach and party town, it also prides itself as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. Malaga is home to a significant collection of his work and other prominent Spanish artists. As I toured museums in both cities, I was struck by the international reach of some contemporary art movements. Among movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism, it was the Dadaist movement in particular surprised me with its worldwide reach.

Dadaism originated with a collection of artists in Zurich who fled from the horrors of World War I. After the armistice of 1918, many of the artists returned to their home countries and founded their own Dada movements. Dada quickly spread to Berlin and New York and within a few years could be seen throughout Europe and by the late 1920s even Japan. Dada made its name by challenging the basic norms of society and the existing conceptions of what could be defined as art. Its rejection of societal norms found followers and ready contributors from all over the world. The word ‘dada’ itself was used for its multilingual and completely ambiguous meaning. In French it means ‘hobby horse’, in German ‘get off my back’ and in Romanian it is simply a variant of ‘yes’ or ‘indeed’.

In Berlin, the Dada movement focused on hypocrisy within politics and the plight of ordinary people as a result of war. Both the Berlin and Zurich Dadaists constructed manifestos outlining the aims and values of Dada artists. The New York Dada movement was much less literary than its European counterpart and focused more directly on the world of aesthetic art. Led by European transplants like Marcel Duchamp, New York Dadaists sought to undermine what was deemed as conventional art through irony. Duchamp and others in the New York scene took everyday objects and submitted them to exhibitionists. The most famous of these everyday objects-turned-artwork was Duchamp’s Fountain, an upward facing urinal. In each respective Dada movement, many of the artists, already international transplants, led transitory lives and never rooted themselves in one place. Dada movements formed and split up sporadically through the 1920s but the fundamental ideas of the movement largely remained and inspired avant-garde artists throughout the world.

After the popularisation of Dada in major cultural centres, the ideologies of the movement attracted artists in France, The Netherlands, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Russia and Japan. Each of these movements shared an aversion for anti-establishment art and politics. They tied themselves to one another through abstract art aimed at fighting conservative and traditional values. Despite the worldwide attraction of Dadaism, the movement did not maintain a coherent collection of artists long enough to form a comprehensive global alliance between its followers. Although, perhaps that was the very essence of Dada. They despised the mainstream and the conventional; creating an established school of art would mean becoming what they stood against.

Two weeks ago, spring break was upon us at last: time to visit family, take a well-deserved break… and squeeze in as much reading as is humanly possible.

Feeling rebellious, and drawn by my own long-neglected bookshelves, I decided that I would also take time over these sixteen days to read something that I wanted to read, without purpose, whose pages I wouldn’t be tempted to pepper with post-it notes. Something entirely unrelated to any of my modules, something fiction, maybe even something I had already read before. The point, I had decided, was to read just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

I skimmed my options, knowing them well enough not to need the bookshop connoisseur’s characteristic right-angled squint. Things that I had studied in English Literature I quickly skipped over, knowing that these would not help me on my mission to go post-it-free for a book or three. I narrowed it down a little further and arrived at this list.

• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
• The Secret River, Kate Grenville
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
• The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel
• The Book of Dust, vol I: La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman
• On Beauty, Zadie Smith
• The Witchfinder’s Sister, Beth Underdown
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Exactly half of them I had read before. Three of them I had only read the blurb or first few pages in the five or ten minutes it had taken me to form an attachment in a charity shop. Two of them I had actively tracked across the Book Depository for several weeks. In any case, I knew enough about each of them that reading down that list came with a realisation that my task was going to be harder than I thought…

Because the interesting thing is, all but one of the titles I had chosen could be treated, in some way, as historical fiction. And, if the writers of fiction were as concerned with categories as we historians, then all but two or three could arguably fall into the category of transnational historical fiction.

From the story of early nineteenth-century London convict sentenced to transportation to New South Wales to a ‘transatlantic comic saga’ exploring the convictions and uncertainties possessed by a mixed-race British-American family living in the twenty-first century United States; from the story of an African slave who, like so many real individuals, chanced a dangerous escape from her situation in Georgia by way of the ‘Underground Railroad’, in this novel curiously represented in physical form, to an equally imaginative retelling of the diverse lives, cultures, and journeys of the Biblical wives and daughter of Jacob and their migration with his sons from Canaan to Egypt.

Yet even in the most dubious in the ‘transnational’ category, Beth Underdown’s unsettling take on the life and work of the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, in mid-seventeenth century Essex (which touches sinisterly though rather briefly on the transatlantic legacy of the Essex witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts) I realised that there was going to be no easy escape from historical thinking. For despite Underdown’s chosen perspective, a fictional sister who, like the community around her, too late begins to realise the terrifying nature of her brother’s work, hers is the most staunchly historical of the lot: fronting each chapter with genuine records kept by Hopkins and his associates, touching upon a number of real trials and characters, and closing her book with an explicit statement on exactly what in the novel is known to be fact, what historians, like herself, have speculated (for example, about Hopkins’ psychology), and what she, as an author, invented for the purposes of the story.

Suffice to say, in the end, I abandoned my quest and accepted that it was probably a good thing to realise that my personal interests align so closely with my academic ones this year. But it did bring me back to a question that I remember from our second-year historiography module on the relationship between microhistory and historical fiction. Is one simply a poor imitation of the other? What makes a good work in either genre? Should we ever allow for the lines to be blurred in ways that are not made explicit, unlike the careful separation in Underdown’s novel?

I recall a tutorial on hagiography in Late Antiquity from a mediaeval history module in first year, and I am personally inclined to say that we should avoid a revival of feigned authenticity, especially since our age seems less and less able to distinguish between truth and invention.

But then again, are we merely unused to doing that footwork? Or, perhaps, are we only unused to doing it for certain media? I should think that most people, when they pick up a book, will be more aware— or at least more wary —of whether it is fiction, non-fiction, or some genre that lies in between (historical fiction, speculative fiction, theory, political forecasting etc.) than when they open an article shared on Facebook, simply because we are used to trusting and distrusting books selectively.

Whether it is the reader’s or the writer’s task to disentangle fact and fiction is, of course, a debate for the ages. Naturally, historians are required to be more careful when it comes to imagination, and more explicit in their navigations between the known and the uncertain or the speculative. But rather than eschew the great unknown in favour of histories told in charts and databases, I believe that process starts with remembering the importance of imagination within our discipline.

History, it might even be argued, can only be an imaginative way of seeing the past, since our points of access are otherwise confined to a finite pool of sources which often produce many and variable meanings anyway. Hence, rather than deride microhistories as works of whimsical insignificance as was implied by that old question from HI2001, I would argue that we should instead congratulate them, for the recognition that, often, it is through small things, unique experiences, and ordinary eyes that we can best imagine a world.  

Thus far into my project, I am still wrapped up with the philosophical implications of identity.

While taking a break from the oh so exciting preamble of the EU, I did my weekly philosophy reading. This week’s topic is focused around aesthetic judgements and implicit biases. Once I had finished Hume’s famous Of the Standard of Taste essay, I was faced with a predicament. Hume is absolutely correct to point out these underlying biases all humans harbour. I think these biases at times, cloud our view of ourselves and the world around us. Really milking the philosophy student cliche, but I am wondering whether our general perception of reality is merely just one of a generated bias. Is there even a standard reality? Or, as I skeptically think, we all just live in our own separate realities. This relates to my project in the sense that identity is merely just how one perceives themselves, and attempts to convince others to see them in the same light. For example, my family is incredibly Eastern European. Though they have embraced the ‘American Dream’ in all senses of the expression, they still feel Hungarian and have strong (sometimes annoyingly strong) views about the political culture of Hungary. For example, my Bubbie (grandmother in Yiddish) HATES JFK. She accuses him of killing  boats of Hungarian refugees attempting to come to the States. Instead of letting the boats come into the country, JFK turned them back, ultimately in my Bubbie’s eyes, killing all of those Jews who were forced to return to occupied Hungary. Moreover, while others see JFK as a hero, pulling the U.S back onto its feet, my Bubbie sides with Hungary, harbouring a bias against any other political decisions JFK would go on to make. In this sense, she lives in her own reality, prioritising the safety of Hungarian Jews like herself over internal advances within the U.S. In this way, it seems individuals like my Bubbie hold transnational biases. What I mean by this is even though my Bubbie only has an American passport and has lived in the states her whole life, her Hungarian traditions and the language they spoke in the house influence her to be more sympathetic to Hungary. Her kinship to her country and origins is merely worn outwardly by labeling herself as “Hungarian.” In this respect identity is merely equivalent to wearing your bias as a name-tag for the world to see, acknowledge, and hopefully, respect.

My point is, identity is socially constructed. This seems obvious but I’m understanding it has a deeper meaning. For example, in terms of the EU, many European policies have been unfairly isolating the East. Countries like Hungary who have a track record of economic upsets and political instability are compared to a yardstick of successful Western countries such as France and Germany. Holding these biases against people, countries, and regions, I would cling to my conclusion that there is no wholly successful “European Identity.” While the concept itself might serve as a tool of unity and solidarity, closer investigation will only strain these connections. For example, A Hungarian like my Bubbie might consider themselves “European” but for different reasons than for which a French person would consider themselves “European.” While the French might cling to cultural similarities like literature, philosophy, and music, Hungary has historically been so isolated from these factors that they cannot relate. For Hungarians, or at least for my Bubbie, being European is not necessarily about this idea of solidarity or conjoined policies, but more the idea of liberation and freedom and protection of human rights. Breaking from Communist rule, many Hungarians are fearful to give over power and control to governmental institutions considering past history. The social benefits and human rights protections are what motivate much of Eastern Europe to consider themselves Europeans.

So I still hold to my cliche philosophical question: Is identity merely just the name tagging of biases?

In the week since the infamous St Patrick’s Day celebrations, I have become increasingly intrigued by the transnational, if not global, appeal of the Irish celebration. Each year it arrives in mid-March St. Patrick’s Day sparks a sense of joy, excitement and dare I say patriotic feeling in me, despite the fact that I myself have no Irish blood (as far as I know of).

This seems the case for many people around the world who, without a familial or personal lineage rooted in Ireland, feel connected to the customs and traditions associated with the Irish holiday. I wondered why this was, how far the origins of the celebration had a role in its current transnationalism and why it has this transnational appeal which seemingly surpasses that of any other national holiday.

The original roots of the celebration might give us some indication of its relevance beyond national borders. Saint Patrick himself was not Irish by birth and was allegedly born in Britain in the fifth century A.D. to an aristocratic Christian family. He immigrated to Ireland with a mission to convert the Irish to Christianity after he had been captured as a slave to pirates for six years. Thus, for many Irish people the day remained a primarily religious and private celebration even into the latter half of the 20^th century, with it only being declared a public holiday in Ireland in 1904.

In fact, the modern version of the holiday as a public celebration is largely an American export, as Cronin and Adair show (Cronin & Adair, 2002). The first recorded celebrations were held in Boston in 1737, where a group of elite Irish men celebrated ‘the Irish saint’ over dinner (Cronin, 2015). Yet the tradition of parading really started in the 1760s amongst Irish Catholic members of the British Army in New York looking to re-connect with their Irish roots.

Emigration and the influence of the Irish diaspora in the 19^th century heightened this holiday’s transnational appeal. The famines in Ireland encouraged some 2 million to emigrate from the island, with most settling in America and Britain (The Economist, 2018). Irish-Americans celebrated their Catholicism and venerated Irish nationalism but they also stressed their patriotic belief in their new home. This explains why Cronin has described St. Patrick’s Day at that time as ‘a public declaration of a hybrid identity’ – one based on the ‘belief in the future of Ireland as a nation free from British rule’ along with ‘a strict adherence to the values and liberties that the U.S. offered them’ (Cronin, 2015).

By the mid-20^th century the holiday had become a celebration of all things Irish and was widely established across America. But celebrations had also become common across the world by this time. The Caribbean island of Montserrat officially marks St. Patrick’s Day with a ‘freedom run’, amongst other things, reflecting its history as a refuge for persecuted Irish Catholics as far back as the 17th century. Every March 17^th Montserrat embodies a transnational fusion of Irish, African and Caribbean tradition. Tokyo has hosted St. Patrick’s festivities since 1992, made all the more unique by the fact that it is largely organized by people who aren’t Irish (Janik, 2015). In Malta the day has been celebrated since the early 20^th century originating with soldiers of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who were stationed in Floriana.

A combination of flexible historical origins with the growth of Irish emigration and openness to the expression of Irish identity across the world seems to give this celebration a distinctly transnational relevance and appeal. It might also just reflect a global appreciation for drinking Guinness, but that’s a more disputable point for another day.

References

Cronin, Michael, & Adair, Daryl, The wearing of the green: a history of St Patrick’s Day (London, 2002).

Michael Cronin, ‘How America Invented St. Patrick’s Day’, (2015) accessible at: http://time.com/3744055/america-invented-st-patricks-day/

Rachel Janik, ‘How St. Patrick’s Day Became the Most Global National Holiday’, (2015) accessible at: http://time.com/3746018/st-patricks-day-global/

The Economist, ‘How St Patrick’s Day celebrations went global’, (2018) accessible at: https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/09/how-st-patricks-day-celebrations-went-global

First I should probably explain what Polandball is and why it is relevant. Polandball is a genre of user generated internet comics where different countries are represented by balls with eyes and the national flag on them. Polandball is a mixed bag like most things on the internet some of the comics are downright offensive or wrong, but a lot of them are funny and surprisingly insightful representations of history and international relations. I learned about Polandball several months ago because my boyfriend spends way too much time on Reddit. The upside to this is that he forwards me the best of what he sees, this is mostly cat videos, but also a great deal of Polandball. I began to realise that Polandball could actually be a valuable tool for getting quick simplified, but memorable summaries of history and politics.

In Polandball the default unit is the nation (the ball), but most comics are about interactions between nations. I started to wonder what different levels of historical analysis would look like as illustrated by Polandball. I have some basic graphic art skills and I couldn’t sleep last night so I decided to take a shot at it. These representations are of course over simplifications, but hopefully they’ll be helpful and/or amusing.

Thanks to the internet in general for the base images.

At the conclusion of today’s Unconference, after successive rounds of collaborative writing, group discussions, and an extremely valuable debate over the superior chocolate in a box of Celebrations (the revisionist position: the Bounty has been widely and quite wrongly neglected in recent scholarship), I find myself feeling unusually optimistic.

Less than a week away from the next deadline, not only do I now feel confident in our ability to crack some of the methodological conundrums that we will be discussing in our essays, but I find I am genuinely excited by the direction of some of our conversations regarding the field of transnational history more broadly.

Within my first group, the conversation was largely to do with our shared interest in the scope for transnational history prior to the late modern era, loosely defined. To indulge in the spirit the day and to free ourselves from the tyranny of multiples of ten, let’s call it the period before 1853.

It appeared very quickly that we shared several ideas amounting essentially to the validity of studying transnational history during this earlier timeframe. These included but were not limited to the idea that, although it was not necessarily a dominant aspect of either personal identity or interpersonal relations, there was at least some kind of national consciousness emerging in European societies during this period, though it will have been conceived and expressed differently at different times and in different spatial or cultural contexts.

Yet again, this led me to thinking— and, forcibly but effectively, to writing —about the need for a closer examination of these emerging solidarities using a transnational lens, an issue with which I have already had a brief encounter in the research and planning of my project proposal. Like Nicholas, I think a lot of my ideas here were inspired by the work of Alison Games, who effectively lights a bonfire under the assumption that early English encounters with distant peoples were dominated by the rationale of different nations or of nationality. However, there is also no doubt in the title of her work that these were English cosmopolitans, however mild or adaptable their connection to their place of origin might have been. And the fact that the nation did not appear to be especially dominant in these exchanges arguably makes it even more interesting when expressions of national identity or the national character of their mission or group do emerge at this time and at these sites.

This leads me nicely onto the subject which I hope to explore in greater detail in my first essay: namely, the construction of space in transnational history. By this, I mean that I want to interrogate the replacement of earlier ‘national’ (and perhaps international) frameworks with an emphatically ‘transnational’ framework which I believe exhibits a number of comparable weaknesses.

Defining his own approach to transnational history in 2008, Erik van der Vleuten lamented that ‘the national histories of the nineteenth century naturalised the nation as the most significant form of human solidarity,’ and, in a move that perhaps encapsulates the mood of the transnational movement, he goes on to ask whether history can unmake what it did so much to make in the first place.

However, I do wonder whether, so far, we have been so preoccupied with unmaking these old assumptions, often focusing on anything but the nation in our attempts to usurp its former dominance, we have forgotten the importance of remaking its history from a new perspective. For in their quest to document more attractive objects of study in the form of transnational lives, spaces, and objects, transnational historians have neglected to re-examine the nation as a historical artefact with a transnational history of its own. And, more concerningly, they have often struggled to reconcile the somewhat limiting scope of ‘transnational’ history with a complex world of connections and migrations not only between the more unitary or, at least, artificially unified entities we would consider nations, but between spaces better understood as composites, borderlands, connected regions, or localities.

Not twenty-four hours ago, these problems would have been frankly terrifying. But today has been a day for challenges, and if our Unconference was any indication, I sense that we are beginning to move from our frantic unmaking of definitions in Week 2 to a gradual but determined remaking.

Bibliography

Erik van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a Transnational History of Technology: Meanings, Promises, Pitfalls’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 974-994. (Quoted from p.982 – thanks to Nick for tracking this down, it’s a brilliant summary, and a very common take on the transnational agenda.)

When Edmund Burke spoke at one of the many trials concerned with the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788—1795), he offered a scathing diagnosis of the British East India Company. At the heart of his accusation, the idea that the Company was effectively ‘a state in disguise as a merchant’ has persisted in scholarly works and in popular imagination for hundreds of years since. So great is its archival legacy that, over the years, many commentators have remarked that the administrative machinery of the Company more closely resembled that of a state than a corporation (Stern, 2012). Yet like so many former or ‘almost’ states — whether forgotten through being subsumed by a more powerful successor, or simply transformed beyond recognition over time — the extensive records of the East India Company have not guaranteed an extensive historiography. 

A relatively small number of narrative histories form the backbone to this body of scholarship. These can, of course, supply us with the requisite chronology — but the life and the times of the East India Company are two very different beasts. As E H Carr noted to wide acclaim, historians are not chroniclers (Carr, 1961). It is therefore very striking that so much of the argument over this strange institution remains more to do with its chronology than its character.  There is, and surely will continue to be, much debate as to the significance of the early period in the Company’s operations to its future as a colonial power. Can we isolate in the seventeenth century an age of partnership between the EIC and its contacts overseas? Or already in these encounters, can we discern the sinister beginnings of an age of empire: the construction of others and selves, of East and West (Said, 1978), even the creation of the Third World (Fanon, 1968)?

These are important questions — but they are not the only questions, nor are they necessarily the best way of asking them. What is largely missing from these debates, and what this project aims to provide, is an attempt to reconstruct the early world of the East India Company that does not rely exclusively on long-term structures and global scales. Instead, this study will give preference to the human actors: a belated ‘history from below’ of the merchants and adventurers who sailed across the world four centuries ago, whose actions and decisions form the vital nervous system of a corporation which simply could not have existed without the networks of people on which depended its networks of trade.

Beyond the Francis Drakes and Robert Clives of classroom folklore, it will consider characters such as Peter Floris and Lucas Antheunis, two Dutchmen employed by the English East India Company in 1609 based on their attractive promise of opening a profitable trade not only with the Coromandel coast of India, but across the Gulf of Siam. It will also consider the Company’s early interactions with native populations, from the so-called ‘spice islands’ of South East Asia to the court of Mughal Emperor, examining a range of accounts from letters and journals in order to examine how these merchants variously invoked and ignored the supposedly ‘national’ character of the Company in order to win greater favour and greater profits.

To this extent, at least, the project owes much of its initial scope to the debates of the 1980s, in which historians first sought to challenge the privileged position of the nation in traditional historiography. No longer perceived as central, universal, or inevitable, the cultural force of the nation has since been laid open to intensive reevaluation on a local and a global scale. As effective ambassadors of their places of origin, transnational actors are naturally of particular interest to such a project.

However, transnational history having many of its own roots in the ‘post-nationalist’ moment of the 1980s, there have so far been relatively few transnational historians willing to write on the subject. Having learned to scorn the ‘invented tradition’ of national histories (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), and to eschew the anachronism — even the simple error — of relying on the nation as a unit of analysis (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), this should perhaps come as no surprise. Yet, as this project hopes to demonstrate, whether or not nations are necessarily reliable as units of analysis, there should be no doubt as to their value as objects of analysis, especially when examined at new sites or using new perspectives.

Hence, through a detailed study of these early adventurers and their relationships, both with their fellow Europeans and with the diverse peoples they encountered across the Indian Ocean, this project will seek to interrogate the significance of the nation in the exchanges of the early English East India Company. Fundamentally, it aims to go beyond the question of ‘when was the nation, and where?’ to ask instead: when did it matter, and why? And, of course, its vital attendant, when did it not? And what mattered more?

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Birdwood, George and Foster, William (eds.), The Register of Letters &c. of the Governor and Company of Merchants trading into the East Indies, 1600—1619 (London, 1893).

Burke, Edmund, ‘Trial of Warren Hastings Esq: Third Day, 15th February 1788’, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol 13, (London, 1822), pp.1-87.

Foster, William (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615—1619: As Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence (New Delhi, 1990).

Strachan, Michael and Penrose, Boies (eds.), The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615—1617 (Minneapolis, 1971).

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

Carr, E H, What is History? (Cambridge, 1961).

Chaudhuri, K N, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-stock Company 1600-1640 (Abingdon, 1999).

Hall, Catherine (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 2000).

Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1968).

Games, Alison, ‘English Overseas Merchants in an Expanding World of Trade, 1590–1660’, in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2008).

Games, Alison, ‘All the King’s Men: Governors, Consuls, and Ambassadors, 1590–1650’, in The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford, 2008).

Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).

Gupta, Ashin Das, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (ed.), The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2001).

Keay, John, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London, 1993).

McPherson, Kenneth, ‘The Age of Commerce, 1450-1700’, in The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (New Delhi, 1993).

Pettigrew, William A, ‘Corporate Constitutionalism and the Dialogue between the Global and the Local in Seventeenth-Century English History’, Itinerario, vol 39, no 3 (2015), pp.487-501.

Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

Stern, Philip J, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2012).

Winterbottom, Anna, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early Easy India Company World (Basingstoke, 2016).