MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

The environment and climate change are issues that are gaining increasing attention and urgency in the climate of today’s world. While there has been rising historical works on the human impact on the environment since the 1960s and 1970s, less has been done with regards to focus on environmental and non-human historical actors, including their impact on the environment and subsequently on humanity. At least from my experience so far, this is something I have not really looked at, which perhaps explains why I overall found this week’s readings particularly interesting, especially when they involved volcanos!

I found Bernhard, Jan Koura and James Koranyi’s draft chapter Icelandic Sulphur: From Paris to Laki and Back particularly fascinating and enjoyable. I think this chapter demonstrates the importance and benefit of adding environmental levels and factors into historical analysis, and what dimensions and transnational effects non-human aspects can contribute.

This is especially through the huge extent of the eruption’s impact, including leading to over 140,000 deaths, which by comparison, is over three times as many deaths that occurred during the American Revolutionary Wars around the same time. Yet, significantly scholarly attention greatly focuses on the latter. Laki has also experienced very limited attention compared to other volcanic eruptions, especially those which had more a ‘eventful’ or ‘explosive’ nature. Despite this, Laki had profound consequences in a variety of different ways across the globe. I think this chapter is a significant and important contribution and example of non-human agency and environmental impact that is outside of the mainstream examples such as Krakatoa, which also encourages similar research into other perhaps overlooked yet significant non-human actors.

Finally, in response to some of the initial questions asked in the draft chapter, based on the readings and my understanding at this stage, I would view volcanos as a transnational catalyst, and sulphur as a transnational actor due from many of the points and effects discussed throughout the chapter. I overall think that it opens up more possibilities for similar enquires into non-human actors, including in a transnational context, the findings and dimensions of which I am excited to learn!

It has been about a week since I last terrorised (read bored) my flatmates with talk of a historical volcano. The last culprit was the 1815 eruption of Mt Tambora, recently connected to the ‘year without a summer’ phenomena by paleo-geologists, paleo-dendrologists and historians.

My casual interest in Tambora meant that the prospect of delving beyond popular history, tree rings and sulphur deposits to engage with some more juicy politico-academic writing on climatic events and volcanos in particular was a prospect that I was very excited for. Particularly the article about how Global Warming was rooted in the British empire (much ballyhooed by Dr Banerjee).  I did enjoy the articles, but when considering how I could write something vaguely interesting or nuanced in this blog, I decided to stay away from vulcanology and focus on where my own interests lie in relation to this, international environmental law.

Now, lawyers and volcanos at face value have some noticeable differences. One is a source of massive displacement, the pollution of the atmosphere, destruction of resources and a terrifying loss of human life, the other is a volcano. Yes, I know, a cheap joke, but it highlights a more serious point about how both global warming and transnational environmental catastrophes are treated by international law, both historically and in the present day.

I note, firstly, the role of international law as a facilitator of colonial treaties, capitalism and violence. Unequal resource extraction treaties, from those which Britain imposed on China and India, to the Bell Trade Act in the modern Philippines facilitated the aggressive extraction of resources and mass production which are responsible for man-made global warming. Additionally, local resistance movements and colonial rivalries over resource security led to territorial contestation, this, combined with the exploitation of humans in the name of resource extraction, created a destructive force, (arguably) every bit as great as a volcano.

The second idea which I would like to discuss briefly, in the spirit of Moore’s ‘radical politics of sustainability’ relates to modern disaster relief in contrast to large scale sustainability initiatives. Individuals and states seem far more willing to expend their own capital to relieve localised ‘others’ when they suffer from a sudden shock event such as a volcano or tsunami than they do to address large scale systemic climatic damage. Perhaps the transnational nature of large-scale global warming leads to ‘bandwaggoning’, perhaps realpolitikal concerns lead to a reluctance to spend capital which could assist a ‘rival’? Whatever the reason, I think the distinction between human reactions in the face of these two forms of environmental catastrophe would be a productive topic for intellectual historians to examine. Even more important, any attempt to re-imagine capitalism with a sustainability rubric will have to work both with and against international law if it wants any chance of success. As such, environmental historians should follow their activist counterparts within international relations in taking international law seriously, and historians of international law may be well served by taking a break from treaties on ‘war’ and focussing instead on those which govern administration and resource regulation.

Unconventional times call for unconventional history, so here we are. This week’s readings featured an ever-fascinating combination of environmental histories, discussions on the Capitalocene, and much volcano talk. As someone who loves intertwined histories and new perspectives, I was intrigued by how these authors integrated and (often toyed with) concepts of ‘nature,’ ‘humans,’ ‘capitalism,’ and ‘power.’ Taking an environmental or nature-considerate approach, in a sense, feels like adding a missing puzzle piece to the larger picture. As products and inhabitants of Earth, it seems long overdue to analyze our relation to and effect on it over time. 

Starting with Malm and Moore, I deeply enjoyed their discussions on the historian’s role in environmental and climate change histories. Malm’s Who Lit This Fire? analyzes the history of the damaging fossil economy, providing examples of the British Empire and its exploitation of colonial spaces and their natural resources and tracing its roots to capitalist motivations, i.e. ‘fossil capital.’ In doing so, Malm calls for historians to investigate the ‘archives of the fossil economy’ to better understand climate changes and environmental responsibility brought upon by fossil capital within the Capitalocene. Similarly, Moore’s two-part article on the Capitalocene presents the intertwinement of capital, power, and nature. Here he argues against an Anthropocene categorization, as it overlooks capitalist environmental exploitation before the Industrial Revolution, and discusses how a radical politics of sustainability must reform the capitalist model. Apparent in both works are urgent calls to action for historians to fully integrate climate concerns and environmentalism into the field rather than focusing solely on social or human-related histories. 

Regarding the ‘Laki’ chapter, I found this the most interesting yet most challenging reading. I enjoyed reading about the transnational aspects of climate events, like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Novel to me were the passages on how Icelandic volcanic debris or ash affected populations as far as Egypt or impacted publications in mainland Europe. Still, I found it difficult to alternate between some sections without the proper background or context. I don’t believe, as the end of the chapter suggests, this attempt was a failure as it presents unique and thought-provoking analyses on transnational climate events and their global effects. With that in mind, I look forward to seeing it develop further into its final published form!

Not having been based in the nation state intellectual history it is perhaps less obvious immediately what the addition of the ‘global’ aspect adds. However, intellectual history has predominantly focussed on western thought and often only connected it to the global context in terms of influence and dominance and it is this that intellectual global history seeks to address. Different approaches could be taken to global intellectual history-global structuring the historian’s research of intellectual history, the history of ideas related to the global, or the discussion of global processes. This last method could be seen as a form of transnational history and would not necessarily have to have a global reach, but simply not be as prescriptive as to the units which were being studied. An important part of global intellectual history would be to study non-western history which would draw attention to areas previously ignored, but rather than simply talking about concepts and cultures as discrete or through influence or dominance this could also be part of a nuanced understanding of global history which focussed on hybridity and the development of ideas through interactions between groups. This smaller focus on interactions and on historical understanding of categories may provide an opportunity to study ‘lived experience’ which can be lacking from other forms of global history such as those which take a more comparative approach. A study of connections could include study of networks or individuals especially, given the importance of language in global intellectual history, those who effectively act as mediators between cultures through involvement in translation. A comparative approach could look at intellectual processes in different parts of the world. Presumably the study of individual concepts would lend itself more to connected histories due to the difficulty of studying concepts which are embedded in their cultural and linguistic context and a comparative approach presumes a limited amount of connection. Global intellectual history may face difficulties in its requirement for working across different languages, the impossibility of understanding other individuals view on the world, and the difficulty of understanding multiple influences, but is a necessary part of understanding how the process of understanding interactions across groups, which is a motivating factor for people studying global history, itself has a history.

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” is the famous question posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her article on how historians’ study and ultimately engage in the nature of Subaltern peoples. In this, Spivak argues that no the historian cannot access the past and the true, full nature of the Subaltern shall remain outside our grasp. Fundamentally, this question, and to an extent Spivak’s answer which I remain divided on, fascinates me as it more truly is asking about the nature and efficacy of the practice of historians more broadly. 

For a struggle I have maintained throughout my entire time studying history at St. Andrews, and I must admit this may sound a combination of cheesy, pessimistic, and strongly self-indulgent, is why? What is the worth of studying figures of the past whose nature we can at best guess at, and whose picture we willingly acknowledge is un-filled and torn? Are we merely grasping at our creations of the mind, that hold no bearing on reality except that which we assign? Spivak clearly maintains that position to be a yes, at least in part, but I am not fully convinced.  

For I do believe that some sort of truth, however flawed, can be realized with enough cleverness and work. I also would firmly argue that historic interpretations, while always colored by the perspective of those that observe and analyze, may at least hold some piece of an image of the past. A whole one, I do not believe so, but at least something. In this though a lot of doubt remains about where that line stands and to what extent is it worth even maintaining contemplation of.  

Now, this may be the part where you expect me to come to some grand notion to bring this all to some satisfying end or some lesson that I may have learned in contemplating this subject, but I am afraid I am fresh out. All I can say is that I am still thinking about it, and that I think you should too. This is our discipline that we champion, and hope to contribute to, and to do so we must know we believe possible. Ask yourself then can the historian speak, and what can they say? 

This week’s subject, Postcolonial Approaches and Global Intellectual History, came at perfect timing for my essay research. During the unconference last weekend, I decided to focus on theory and intellectual history that will help frame my later project. My project proposal is to research: In what ways have attitudes towards female bodies within the British Empire affected their role in hunger strikes over time? This question and early research have piqued my interest in the intersectionality of being a colonized individual and a woman, almost a double subaltern. Relating this idea to hunger strikes, Kevin Grant explained, “Like women, colonized men in Ireland and India turned to voluntary starvation as a way to combat a government that recognized their biological right to exist, but not their political standing.” I’m curious about the Indian and Irish subaltern within hierarchies of the British Empire, and then how that is two-fold for women. Some articles I am reading right now are:

Fasting for the public: Irish and Indian sources of Marion Wallace Dunlop’s 1909 hunger strike, Joseph Lennon 

Decentring empire : Britain, India, and the transcolonial world / edited by Durba Ghosh, Dane Kennedy. 

Subaltern Women’s Narratives: Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies, Edited By Samraghni Bonnerjee 

From this, I decided my essay aim is to study postcolonial Ireland and India as the subaltern and what that means in a gender studies context to help frame my larger project.  Some threads of study I’m interested in are traditions of fasting in both Irish and Indian premodern culture, colonial experiences in Ireland and India, and postcolonial theory and orientalism focusing on the portrayal of subalterns (thank you Jemma for the suggestion!). As mentioned in my project proposal, hunger striking has gendered, feminized connotations and I’m interested in learning more about this idea in relation to bodily autonomy, agency, and fasting as a last resort of power.  

In addition, what makes Ireland and India particularly interesting to research is their long-term histories of fasting and famine. I am curious how a community that has experienced passive famine responds differently to hunger striking. There should be interesting links to government, and responsibilities of nourishment.

Speaking with Dr. Banerjee has directed me towards looking at the etymology of the word boycott, and its possible Irish origins. Looking at the etymology of terms such as boycott, striking, fasting, hunger, etc will likely enlighten their connotations and denotations. I am also planning to watch the 2008 movie Hunger, which is about the 1981 Irish hunger strikes, a topic of my project. Dr. Banerjee also directed me towards the works of Margaret Nivedita and James Cott.

I am super excited about this project. It will be a lot of reading! But I think (and hope!) that it will be engaging and rewarding. I requested the following books to be purchased by the library (who knew I could do that!) and look forward to diving in.

Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth-Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland by S. B. Cook

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/463881358

Ireland and India : colonies, culture and empire by Tadhg Foley;  Maureen O’Connor

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1051434517

Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and History. Eóin edt Flannery 

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1006131501

Indian suffragettes : female identities and transnational networks, Sumita Mukherjee

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1048391633

Montreal mayor, John Dradeau, famously stated that “the Olympics can no more run a deficit than a man can have a baby”. Despite an original estimate that the games would cost the city C$120m, Montreal was left with a bill of C$1.6bn, more than a 13-fold increase from the original estimate.

Olympic Games offer the host city a rare opportunity to show off on the global stage, financially, athletically, artistically, and politically. Spurred by the overwhelming success of the city’s World Fair in 1967 and their new major league baseball team’s triumph against the St Louis Cardinals two years later, Montreal sought another global sporting title: host of the XXI Olympiad. In 1970, Montreal won the 69^th International Olympic Committee bid to host the 1976 Olympic Games, winning out over Moscow and Los Angeles. Montreal thus secured the opportunity to appear on the global stage as a North American financial hub with as much sophistication and culture as Europe.

The games were sold to the Montreal public as an inexpensive project from which the benefits would by far outweigh the drawbacks. Indeed, the estimated cost of C$120m seemed a generally modest amount for the alluring financial benefits the games offered. However, following the tragedy at the Munich games four years prior, Montreal increased security measures to a previously unprecedented level. At a grand total of C$100m, security for the 1976 Olympic games already took up over 80 per cent of the original estimate. With C$70m set aside in the original estimate for the stadium alone, the games started to seem more like a financial burden than the thing that would launch up-and-coming Montreal onto the global stage as a major player.

With 22 African countries boycotting the games, dozens of East German athletes accused of participating in a state-run doping campaign, and an abysmal performance by Canadian athletes, the ensuing political and economic disaster in Montreal wasn’t shocking. During the games, these misfortunes were overshadowed by performances from athletes such media star and decathlon gold medallist, Bruce Jenner, Vasily Alekseyev who set an Olympic record lifting 440kg in the snatch, and, the unquestioned individual start of the games, 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci of Romania who earned a perfect 10 on the uneven bars. However, when the athletes and fans returned home, and the excitement of the games wore off, Montreal was left with a bill it would not pay off until 2006, three decades later. Originally called the ‘Big O’, Montreal city-goers are now more likely to refer to the Olympic stadium as the ‘Big Owe’.

This is just a bit of my research proposal that didn’t make the word count. A bit of a teaser trailer for the rest of the paper.

As we approach our methodological essay’s deadline, I am becoming more and more grateful that I chose subject matter a bit more specific to my project topic. I considered for a good bit whether to focus on something more basic, such as the differences between transnational history and comparative history – while this essay would have yielded some interesting points about the two distinctions, I am unsure of how pertinent this information would be to my project. By focusing on methodological issues that accompany the problematic (at times) concept of ‘nation’, I am engaging with more case study examples of nations outside Eastern Europe. The subject of French nationalism and ‘nation’ has always appeared to be a daunting path to go down as there is such a wide and rich range of literature and discourse on the matter. I am familiar with some of the basic tenets of the French model of nationalism but have thoroughly enjoyed exploring more – I do not know why I should be so shocked as I love watching Les Miserables just as much as everyone else. I digress – Exploring the relationship between the emergence of nationalism in France, largely as a result of the French Revolution, and the rise of Enlightenment ideals and philosophers has been quite useful in my research regarding postmodernism and conceptions of nation. Focusing on the issues of the ‘nation’ as a unit of analysis has tied in nicely with broader issues emphasized by postmodernist ideas; exploring what constitutes the character of a given nation while questioning the hierarchy of these views has tied in some of the key ideas of philosopher-historians such as Foucault and Lyotard – in particular, their views on power structures and metanarratives, respectively. Avoiding a too philosophical focus has proven to be a bit difficult considering its relevance to my current project and also how convoluted the language of some of the articles and books on these more theoretical topics. Although, I have found that focusing on the emergence of the concept of the nation as a unit of analysis has helped to uncover some of the anachronistic tendencies and oversimplifications of how even newer subsets of historical disciplines are being conducted today. 

In regards to my project, I have struggled navigating the online platforms for primary Ukrainian and Belarusian sources. I have even encountered some Russian online sources being blocked by WiFi or just being completely shut down due to the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Sources on nationhood and nationalism have been easier to narrow down; I am currently reading Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (1983) to get a better grasp of how nationalism is disseminated. My flatmate is currently writing a paper on Chinese nationalism and recommended it to me. I am trying to be more conscientious about the authorship of these histories of nationalism but I have found a lot of the scholarship to be based on American education institutions. I think focusing on different realms of nationalism and nation outside of Europe might help to aid this issue.

Chernobyl is situated in Ukraine, at the fringe of Eastern Europe. There are so many explorations of the affect of Chernobyl in Soviet and post-Soviet states, and on Western Europe, which is what led me to explore this topic on a European scale. Indeed, when I was first introduced to the topic of Chernobyl, it was in the context of women in Greenham Common who protested against anything nuclear. They were a pacifist, environmentalist group of women, some of whom used their parenthood as a reason for protest. And, of course, this pushed me to explore parenthood in my long essay.

So, an essay on environmentalism, centralising a Ukrainian disaster, depends on Western Europe for its scope? Okay, fabulous, the radiation fell a long way, so this makes sense. What does not make sense, however, is that I didn’t even consider the impact of Chernobyl further East and South. How painfully Eurocentric of me. I actually didn’t consider that, if Britain was impacted by the disaster, so might have Kazakhstan or Turkey. I only considered Europe in this exercise, and without a second thought decided to use the Iron Curtain as a boundary, rather than Eurasian boundaries. Why? A little something called Eurocentrism.

I am critical of the field, or our schooling systems more than myself. I do find interest outside of European history, including African history. I even discussed for a history conference medieval African and Asian trade, ignoring completely Europe to make a point about the Eurocentrism of medieval history. And now I fall victim to this in modern history? Mainly, I fall because of the literature available. France, Britain, West Germany, all come up frequently in historical, anthropological, and scientific discussions. But these aforementioned countries that could have been affected never do. 

So how do I tackle my issue? I think I will consider Turkey – a country with a foot in both Europe and Asia – in my analysis. I will consider literature that discusses Turkey, and try to find any visual sources from Turkey that discusses this issue. And, in the future, before I instinctively look Westwards, I will draw a circle around my focal point; where does this circle encompass? 

This week’s topic could not have come at a better time. Discussions on global intellectual history and postcolonial theory are not only extremely relevant in today’s political, social, and environmental climate (pun intended) but provide a new perspective to both ‘global’ and ‘intellectual’ historical approaches. While at its core global intellectual history concerns the study of ‘global’ ideas, it is more complicated than that. As many of this week’s readings identify, scholars cannot (or most definitely should not) attempt to ‘globalize’ intellectual history without acknowledging the implicit Eurocentric or Western power structures and systems at work or perspectives they may hold. Neither, as Milinda Banerjee argues, can they simply substitute the study and works of elite white men with those of elite brown men nor occasionally pepper Western narratives with marginalized actors. With this in mind, global intellectual history must engage with anti-/post-colonial discourses to fully address a ‘global’ perspective.

I encountered a similar theme while researching for my short paper. While investigating the historiographical origins of Latin America (and Latin Americans) within global and Atlantic history, I stumbled upon a general disconnect. On one side, Western (typically American/British, but also some broader European) historians lamented the absence of Latin American/Caribbean scholars and topics in the field. On the other, prominent Hispanic- and Luso-American scholars detailed their extensive (since the 1940s) engagement with global, trans-imperial/transnational, and Atlantic perspectives. My current hypothesis, as will be detailed in my essay, argues that this disconnect stems from language barriers and Western academic systems that have confined Anglophone scholars within a Eurocentric bubble. Restricted by this, these scholars then chastise other regions for not producing ‘equivalent’ scholarship, reinforcing Eurocentrism within global and Atlantic world history.

To be honest, I found this week’s readings to be very challenging. But this wasn’t a tedious or apathetic ‘challenging,’ but one that demanded I explore further and rethink my current presumptions. While complex, the intersection between many different subfields, like feminist, queer, decolonial, Marxist, anti-racist, and environmentalist discourses, piqued my interest. It is this intersectionality, specifically in the call to action through these discourses, that I find most significant. As much as historians are criticized for their ivory towers, education and novel approaches can (and will) exact meaningful change.  

In the spirit of week 8’s seminar on Global Intellectual History I have decided to address some of the things I have been thinking through in relation to the upcoming essay deadline. I will be writing on Global Legal History, which is a discipline in which Intellectual history is employed heavily.

I will open with the observation that a majority of the ‘global’ intellectual histories of International Law which I have read, see their global approach as a corrective to status quo politics or ‘ways of seeing’ history. Whilst it is not a necessary component of a global intellectual history, it seems to me (in my admittedly narrow reading) that many scholars in this area identify with more ‘critical’ epistemologies. This is an interesting observation for me, considering that in my other discipline of international relations, literature on International Law is dominated by scholars within the ‘classical liberal tradition,’ who forward positions which would be anathema to the Marxists and Post-colonialists whose work has dominated the last two weeks of my studies.

A second observation would be that these scholars, liberal, critical or otherwise almost always default to a traditional theoretical framework within which to study global intellectual currents. Variants of world-systems theory and realpolitik seem to be in vouge in my current area of research, having replaced the cosmopolitanism of soviet scholars and earlier anti-colonial perspectives. However, pretty much any serious debate between these academics (for anyone interested I would direct you to a written debate between Arnulf Becker Lorca, Jean-Louis Halpérin and Douglas Howland) admits that such overarching theories are insufficient to write any totally valid global intellectual history. Tensions between different localised intellectual ideas simply prove impossible to fit within the ambit of one model. This has led me to think that the task of writing a truly global intellectual history which does not deal in certain generalisations is probably a chimera. However, that is not to say that global intellectual history is useless (if it was, I wouldn’t be doing a project on it). Like other ‘global histories’ scholars can mess around with micro and macro perspectives to identify, explain and contextualise certain intellectual trends, which I have seen frequently termed as ‘glocalism’. However in employing a glocal approach it becomes necessary to identify new containers and categories which comprise the ‘local’, a task that simply takes us back to the problems of national history, just without the vitriol. My recent reading has really made me question the value of purportedly universal theoretical modelling within global scale research.

Of course, any good theorist admits their model will not account for all eventualities, and I think even the most ardent of post-colonialists or realists would not suggest their theories had universal explanatory value. As such, I almost feel like my frustration with theory is a bit of a straw man. However, in my own defence, academics continue to deploy all the theories I have mentioned into global contexts they are not really suited to explain. I feel like, especially from my very brief foray into Global Legal History, a turn away from theory would be beneficial. I have little doubt that these issues (nb. These are issues in my opinion and others may not see them as such) persist across global history. It just happens that Intellectual and legal history is the area which interests me most and as such, where I am best placed to see this.

As I am still researching my short essay on the links between environmental history, history of empire and transnational history, I would like to use this post to outline some of my thoughts.

Having chosen to work on environmental issues, I realize, is extremely convenient for a module on transnational history: what better transnational thread of analysis can there be than climate change? Although early environmental history scholarship has focused on national environmental issues and policies, most environmental historians actively call for the adoption of alternative scales and spaces of analysis.

Adopting environmental lenses is an especially powerful mean to reconfigure the ‘geographies of empire’.

Indeed, studying global phenomena enable historians to free themselves from the nation state – colony framework. Some analyses take on a truly global perspective, jumping from one colony to another in one page, as they trace abnormal temperatures and death tolls. Others, disregarding traditional political boundaries discuss simultaneously settler and extraction colonies such as New Zealand and Egypt. If some studies adopt comparative approaches, most of them focus on transnational networks and exchanges, making the empire seem like one single entity integrated through “webs of empire” and environmental concerns.

A parallel tendency encouraged by those environmental lenses has been to ‘zoom in’ and put forward the inherently local character of empire. However global environmental phenomena can be, their consequences and the experiences people make of them are always grounded. Adopting a bottom-up approach starting from several case studies to then build a wider perspective is therefore one very common method among historians. If the local is the basis for the global, it also enables to challenge it, as each local site develops its own specific way of relating and responding to the environment. The empire thus becomes “glocal”, all at once a single entity and a mosaic of unique configurations.

At this point in my reading and thinking, I asked myself ‘so what?’. What is the use of shifting from a state-colony to a glocal frame of analysis? I still need to do a bit more reading about this, but the main idea is that it “decentres” the empire, or “provincializes” Europe, and changes our understanding of imperial power structures. Indeed, we soon realize that the traditional model of diffusion of ideas, resources and agency from Europe to the colonies is extremely simplifying, especially when working on environmental conservation ideas and practices. In fact, most of these ideas and practices developed in, and circulated between, the colonies, outside of the channels of exchanges with Europe.  This challenges, in the field of the history of sciences for example, the idea of all-powerful European “centres of calculation”: the peripheries become the centre. Moreover, the glocal enables to reveal the agency of colonized populations who often actively participated or resisted to environmental conservation practices and thus, once again, to relativise the homogeneity of European imperial power.

I feel that I have already reflected on a lot on these themes but, as I keep coming across them in my readings, I felt the need to reformulate them once again, hopefully with some added value to my previous reflections.

While researching for my short essay on the development of transnational history and its impact on the historiography of women’s history, I came across another dimension that I could incorporate into my project: that of gender history and theory. While I was always intending to engage with and contribute to women’s history through my project, gender theory and history could bring a new dimension and further nuance.

Women’s history ultimately looks at bringing women into the historical narrative and giving light to their experiences, contributions, and voices which had previously been excluded. Gender theory emerged after women’s history. As noted by Bonnie Smith in the Introduction to Women’s History in Global Perspective, it focuses on the categories of masculine and feminine and their associated characteristics with male and female. It analyses how these characteristics shaped and even produced people’s lives, and challenges them and their agency and dominance. Opposite to sex which focuses on the biological determinants, gender sees masculinity and femininity as mutually constituted, socially constructed concepts. These understandings produce hierarchies where the masculine generally dominates the feminine, and these produce values, meanings and understandings.

Gender theory directly links to my project: the women involved in international women’s organisations, including during the interwar years, were actively challenging their gender roles. This was both through their organisation, activism and presence in the public sphere, as well as overall through many of the issues and goals they were campaigning for. By incorporating gender theory into my project, it could increase the understanding into the background against which women were campaigning and working collectively against, and the extent and significance of their collective work and achievements due to how deeply traditional gender roles were embedded into society.

Additionally, some of this week’s key readings illuminated yet another dimension of analysis that I could potentially incorporate into my project: that of transversal and transcultural history. In our very own Milinda’s article, Transversal Histories and Transcultural Afterlives: Indianised Renditions of Jean Bodin in Global Intellectual History, he notes that the globalised movement of a concept also involves it weakening, negation, agitation, and reformation as well as just being transferred and translated. As part of this, transversal history looks at how different moments become connected, and resultantly how “new ethnic-political decisions” are made because of these connections. In the realm of intellectual history, it especially means regarding discursive moments (page 166).

In relation to my project, I think this could, for example, provide a further insight and analysis of a concept such as women’s suffrage. I could look at this in different places at different times, and see how it was understood in different international women’s organisations. Through analysing the impact of different cultures and understandings on something such as suffrage, it could provide information on variations of how it was perceived and thought of, wider implications and associations, and resulting decisions. Therefore, through incorporating these as well as gender theory, they could provide further beneficial insights, backgrounds, and dimensions.

The unconference was an interesting exercise for me in evaluating how I work and think versus how my peers work and think. While I have looked up “polish women migration” “polish women transition period” so many times at this point, it was interesting to see what my other group members found using their fresh perspective and searching on Google. Avery did this and found a webpage called ‘War, Cold War, and New World Order: political boundaries and Polish migration to Britain’ by Kathy Burrell at De Montfort University. This page includes testimonies about both men and women’s experiences migrating, and how before the fall, migrating from Poland meant you were preparing to never return to Poland. As some of the oral history in this webpage touches upon Polish identity and its relation to migration, I hope to examine it further for my final paper. Another aspect that I enjoyed about the unconference was hearing from both professors during our Tribe A exercise. I think as students of history, we are so used to hearing “what are you going to do with that degree after uni?” and sometimes feel discouraged by how unfeasible other students or adults make a successful career after doing history seem. Hearing the optimism both Dr Struck and Dr Banjeree have about their career choices and research made me feel a bit more relaxed about my degree choice and that it is worth studying a subject that I love, rather than one that is focused only on making money after graduation. 

At the unconference I was brainstorming a topic for my short essay, and after looking over the course document and its encouragement of focusing on historiography, I think I want to focus more on the historiography of migration, gender and Poland. This will illuminate hubs of migration that have already been focused on (Chicago, Germany, UK, etc.) and in this will also showcase where the gaps lie that my research and final paper can fill. Another idea that I wrote about during our speed writing sessions on Saturday is to focus on what is going on in Poland in the postwar period that affects women such as contraceptives, child care, and employment changes. Still, I think context about these phenomena will arise in papers about gender in Poland that can then be coupled with migration. Another idea is to look deeply into social reproduction theory, however, I do not want to push too many things together in just 2,000 words. These are my journal-like thoughts after Saturday and as I head into writing the short essay.

Saturday’s unconference was really helpful for me. I was quite intimidated by the idea of sitting and writing with someone looking over my shoulder, but it was actually really nice to be able to talk out my idea and narrow down my questions into something that makes sense, which I was struggling with and do not think I did clear enough in my project proposal. I am still trying to make my questions as clear as possible, but I now know I want to focus on the transnationality of tourism, and how tourism is used to help legitimize authoritarian governments. To do this I will use two case studies, looking specifically at the Soviet Union and Spain and looking at how these two governments created their own tourism bureaus because they saw the necessity of tourism in the promotion of their country and their ideals. I found some Soviet tourism advertisements from the interwar period specifically targeting the United States and encouraging Americans to visit for a vacation and also see the implications of socialism within the community. The soviet propaganda was earnest in selling their ideologies to American citizens, to try and disprove what capitalist governments were perpetuating. In Spain, resorts were being developed to take advantage of their coastlines, selling their beaches and the warmth of a Spanish summer to Northern countries. The government also worked with TWA and Hilton Hotels to create a travel industry within Spain that would appeal to Western citizens, encouraging Americans to visit because of the familiarity. How did these countries use tourism as a way to be legitimized by western, capitalist countries, and did it work? The interaction foreign tourist and becoming a part of the global world was a vital part for countries in the latter half of the twentieth century. 

Another aspect that I find important when analyzing the government interest is the response from foreigners. Were tourists convinced when visiting the country? What were their takeaways from visiting a country with this kind of dictatorship put in place? And did these visitors feel that their experiences were authentic? When traveling to another country, even in modern times, there is an idealized view of travel, of someone who is able to go off the beaten track and delve deep into the true culture of a place. There is a desire to venture away from the tourist traps, find the hole-in-the wall restaurants and explore not just the famous sites. But can one person really see the true aspect of a culture after a week or two in one place? I believe that it is really hard to leave out one’s own opinions, stereotypes, and prejudice when traveling, and part of the culture of a community is living within the mundane and the day-to-day lives of a community. However, not a lot of people go into this much depth when thinking about traveling. So for those who were able to glimpse into the Soviet Union or Franco’s Spain, did they question the reality in which they were seeing? I want to look into tourists’ awareness of the cultures they were traveling to, and if they changed their mind about the preconceived notions they knew about these countries. To summarize, the reactions of tourists once they visited the Soviet Union or Spain. Did the government efforts to increase tourism work and were they able to convince foreigners of their countries legitimacy? Going further, looking into the foreigners’ understanding of the country they were visiting, and if they believed that what they saw was a truly authentic experience. 

With more research I will be able to narrow down my ideas and continue to make it even clearer. Tourism is all about the interaction between nations, and for the Soviet Union and Franco’s Spain, there was an understanding around the importance of these types of interactions. I want to find out more about how they capitalized on these interactions and what was the response. I also need to make sure I do not try to cover too much, and with more research I will be able to decide the limits of my essay.