MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

In #week 2 our final speed-writing exercise included a postcard to Granny. Grappling with the openness, alleged lack of definition, this is what we wrote.

Dear Granny,

greetings from sunny St Andrews. This semester I am doing a module on transnational / global history. It is all a bit confusing at the start but essentially…

-Transnational history is an approach to history that includes forces, actors, ideas, commodities, networks, and movements ranging across boundaries on a variety of different scales.

-Transnational history is the study of the human and material connections in between and amongst places in the past.

-Transnational history is the study of relationships, networks, and movement between people, ideas, goods, and capital over national, regional, and continental boundaries. This can take multiple forms, incorporating diverse methodological and ideological approaches.

-Transnational history is history that affects more than just one nation and where the main subject is not a nation. Transnational history is especially useful for studying networks ideologies and ideas that have effects that are not just in one country. It is also useful for studying how cultures, nations and the people within them are networked together.

Back to the library now. No YouTube or Facebook for the next 4 hours.

Best wishes, MO3351.

When I was in school we never did European History. In elementary school we explored the history of concepts like writing and numbers. I remember carefully marking a clay tablet in cuneiform. When I switched schools in 4th grade we started to do a lot of American History. 6th grade was Ancient Civilisations from the Mayans to the Ancient Chinese, Rome and Greece were covered, but I don’t remember anything about Western Europe. In 7th Grade we did world geography, that involved a bit more European History, because we had a unit on each continent. In 8th grade it was back to American History, which since I’m from Lexington Massachusetts tended to be very heavy on the revolutionary war and sort of gloss over the rest. In 9th grade I took World History, it was as Matthew Connelly puts it, civilisation du jour, not Eurocentric or ethnocentric, but once we got passed the development of agriculture there was no cohesive narrative. In 10th grade I took Advancement Placement World History. I loved that class. Towards the end it became more like global history or even the history of globalisation. We essentially only explored the late modern world in terms of relationships across vast distance. We learned about the Opium war, but nothing about English domestic politics during that time.

That class is also where I probably first learned the word Eurocentric. The class had obviously been developed as a response to earlier more Eurocentric curriculums. I had never experienced a truly Eurocentric curriculum, but that is when I came to realise that most of the adults around me had. My mom is a scientist, but I’ve been a history geek since age four, and she never minded hearing me yammer on about it. She was really surprised by a lot of the stuff I was learning in World History, especially about science done outside Europe. She actually became fairly frustrated with how Eurocentric the history curriculum she had in school was, because she felt that she had been deprive of relevant information.

In 11th grade I took yet more American History, East Asian Studies and Political Thought. Political Thought was my only truly Eurocentric class before uni, and many of the students actively complained that Confucius wasn’t given his due.

In my education prior to uni, Europe was effectively provincialised. This never seemed that abnormal to me. I didn’t go to school in Europe and about 40% of my classmates weren’t of European descent, so it made sense to me that the curriculum did not focus on Europe more than anywhere else. Some would probably criticise the education I had as an example of rampant political correctness, I wouldn’t. Although not having done European History has certainly proved inconvenient at St Andrews.

When I came here to St Andrews, my first history module was Scotland Britain and Empire (I had to reverse some classes because I also do psychology). That module was honestly a bit scary. I went into it very self confident, after all I had supposedly already done two years of university level history classes in High School. I was wrong to be that confident, it was a genuine struggle both to get my writing up to the appropriate level, and to go from a global perspective to a national and European one. Many of the Historians whose work we read this week discuss the struggles of turning away from European and national history, I would say that switching towards it is equally hard. I think this means that the European perspective should maybe not be viewed as more intuitive or natural.

You are ten, maybe eleven weeks into your final semester of sub-honours-level history. And, although the town has been left feeling curiously post-apocalyptic after weeks of snow, ice, and bitter pensions disputes, you’re clinging to your last few tutorials as if they are all you have in the world. You check the time on your phone. You should probably get going.

It’s the time of day again when, as usual, you find yourself checked onto that strange and constant conveyor belt of students, beginning somewhere close to ALDI, that trundles slowly along Largo Road towards the roundabout (which, after a heated discussion with my housemates, I am forced to conclude is probably better known by its proximity to the Whey Pat than by its looming mediaeval gate), there to widen and scatter its many passengers into the older, prettier, and pricier heart of the town.

You make it to St Katharine’s Lodge with a minute or two to spare.

Your tutorial passes surprisingly quickly for class with approximately three surviving students in it. In the last five minutes, you turn to the number of next week’s reading and are pleasantly surprised to find Global History printed across the top of the page. Well, you suppose at the very least it might be a little more outward-looking than the Whigs, whigs, and the whiggish.

You flip through the section— it’s narrow enough, some small print, but nothing completely monstrous that jumps out at you. What about the readings? You recognise Christopher Bayly, maybe one or two others. But there are no three-hundred-word article titles, no indecipherable jargon, and nothing longer the thirty pages including endnotes. All in all, not a bad lot.

And then the hammer blow.

If you were hoping for more of the transnational side of things, read Jan Rüger.

Okay. Fair enough. Who’s Rüger?

It’s a really interesting microhistory. He looks at the history of the OXO cube and sort of uses it to…

We’re going to be reading about stock cubes. Right.

I never thought I’d find myself sitting at a computer trying to contrive a metaphor adequate to frame the friendly stock cube as a hard and bitter pill, but suffice to say, I wasn’t terribly excited about it.

And then I actually read it.  

One year later, I’m enrolled onto a transnational history module, and Jan Rüger appears on the reading list. If you would like my review, in a sentence?

I read it again.

And I looked forward to it. Because in that strange, witty little article, there is a wonderful amount to learn, and not only in its material and human examples: of a Bavarian inventor and a shrewd founder with a host of transnational connections, of Uruguayan cattle meat purchased at a third of the European price and an idea which might never have been realised without the cashflows and credit of the powerful London stock exchange.

No, there is not much extraordinary about the story of OXO, in a world which Rüger himself acknowledges was rapidly learning to connect the dots between its various human and natural resources, scattered across the globe, often in ways that were controversial and destabilising.

However, there is plenty that is exemplar in the historian’s approach to the topic: his engagement with the meaning of transnational history, by neither excluding nor privileging the national story, which he shows us constitutes only one dimension of the OXO example (though still an important dimension if we are to engage critically with the concept of nations at all) is the most obvious example.

Finally, and I would suggest most importantly, Rüger reminds us that it is important, as we discover new ways of looking at our world, not to become too embroiled in our conclusions to make the same error as more traditional approaches that we often come to frown upon.

Ask new questions, yes. But as we advance in this new field and refine this new approach, let us not lose sight of the old questions and approaches. Let global historians engage with microhistories. Let transnational historians continue the study of nations, incidentally or otherwise.

For clearly, this is the surest way to generate a conversation between newer and older histories. And surely that, most of all, is what keeps our discipline alive.

I have yet to find any clear definition of transnational history, and perhaps this should come as little surprise. The ‘angle’, ‘way’, ‘perspective or ‘response’ of transnational history is relatively new: not just to me, but the wider academic community in general. 

Is the lack of definition problematic? Can ‘transnationalists’ agree on the nature of their ‘perspective’?

To tackle these questions, I turned instinctively to my ‘bible’ – the sixth edition of John Tosh’s ‘Pursuit of History’.^[1]An absolute must have, in my view, for anyone attempting to negotiate HI2001, or the scope of historical enquiry more generally. Tosh’s work provides several chapters (‘Mapping the field’, ‘The uses of history’ and ‘Historical awareness’ for example) dedicated to explaining the various subdisciplines of history.  

As far as know, Tosh does not term his work ‘transnational’. A well-accomplished historiographer however, I thought it useful to weigh his take on transnational history against those insights provided by transnationalists like Patricia Seed and Chris Bayly. 

From Tosh’s description, I took what I found to be the three most important features of this new and exciting discipline. First, that it provides a basis for challenging the national paradigm of historical analysis, primarily by illuminating the global ‘networks’ that have shaped aspects of national development. Second, that these transnational ‘networks’ function at sub, supra and inter – national levels. That is to say that they exist below, above, in-between or across nations (as a ‘full range of contacts and influences from abroad’). Third, that transnational history does not discriminate with respect to the ‘types’ of ‘network’ it seeks to explore. 

Turning next to the 2006 AHR review (particularly with respect to those comments on the ‘distinctiveness of transnational history’) my concern about the problem of ‘doing’ transnational history without a clear definition of the field changed. I found Tosh’s description echoed those provided by the six contributors. Beckert’s account of transnational history as skeptical of what he termed the national ‘enclosure’ resonated with the idea of decentralizing the national paradigm. The frequency with which terms like ‘across’, ‘movement’, ‘interpenetration’ and ‘flows’ appeared in relation to the idea of transcending national boundaries was analogous to Tosh’s idea of extra-national forces determining national development. Appadurai’s ‘space’, or (better perhaps) ‘spaces’ of ‘the flows’ was / were certainly comparable to what we might be able to describe as ‘levels’ of transnational interaction (above, below and in-between the nation). It seemed as if there was a good deal of consensus on the character of approach after all.  

If I could then describe ‘transnational’ history, might it look something like this?

‘The study of those extra-national or national historical forces that have moved above, below, between and across national borders’.    

I liked the idea of using ‘forces’, instead of targeting ‘people’ or ‘goods’ specifically. It left scope for more natural energies (disease or climate change for example): those also capable of moving across national borders at different levels. The idea of using ‘movement’ also appealed to me. ‘Flow’ seemed to imply linear or one-sidedness direction. 

I’m not quite sure of how fruitful this self-invented exercise has been to the reader, but I do now (fingers crossed) have a much stronger understanding of what transnational history can involve. 

Back then to the original questions I posed at the beginning of this entry (I’ll work backwards). I do think there is a general consensus on the ‘nature’ of the transnational perspective. Some of the more nuanced expressions however (‘forces’ rather than ‘networks’ for example) that can be used to describe the focus of that perspective itself, might well be subject to contest. As to my first question, I’m ironically beginning to appreciate the lack of a clear-cut definition. It affords the potential for massive, perhaps untraditional analytical scope (something that may serve me well further down the line during the progression of this module). 

Admittedly there are still some issues I would like to resolve. Does transnational history seek to understand the flows that shape nations, the nations which shape the flows, or both? Am I right in thinking that the discipline can incorporate ‘natural’ rather than exclusively ‘man-made’ ‘forces’? Does it examine the movement of these ‘forces’, or their reception in different / exclusive national contexts? 

^[1]Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of history(London, 2015).

Project Idea: What actually is the European Union?

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

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

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

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

My three main question I would want to focus on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It feels like just yesterday that I was sitting in MO3351 for the first time, somewhat apprehensive about the semester. I’ll be completely honest and say that the reason I was wary of the module had nothing to do with how it was taught or the workload, but rather the subject material of the weekly reading. I dislike historiography (HI2001 was a dark time in my life), something I think stems from three semesters of studying almost exclusively theoretical approaches to the other part of my degree, International Relations (IR). My history modules were always sort of my escape from the endless talk of paradigms and epistemology and relativism that seemed to haunt every aspect of IR. Trying to do the early readings in this course, therefore, was an unpleasant awakening. I remember going home after the first seminar determined to switch modules – I felt out of my depth and like I was in the wrong module completely.

Of course, I realize that my aversion to theory is a personal problem. I know that historiography is a serious and in fact vital part of studying history. History is a subjective field and as a result, in order to represent the past accurately we must understand how we approach its study. My boredom and annoyance with academic theory is my own issue – just because writing a historiography essay feels like pulling teeth does not mean that it is unimportant, merely that it is definitely not my forte.

However, just because I complained a lot about transnational historiography does not mean that I did not learn a great deal from or enjoy this module. Like Ollie mentioned in his previous blog post, I feel that I have come away from this module with an actual (if not perfect) understanding of what transnational history actually is. Before, I had simply assumed it meant history that had occurred outside of the borders of a specific country – any history of World War I would thus be automatically transnational, because WWI was global in scope. I did not connect the ‘transnational’ element as referring to a movement of actors, goods, and ideas across borders, nor did I understand the importance of networks in transnational history (Andy’s blog post on Actor-Network Theory was particularly helpful in this).

I also noted a definite improvement – or at least acknowledgement – of my work habits through this semester. Having to write down exactly how many coffees I will go to in order to avoid work was truly sobering. I found our pair-writing exercises far more effective than I thought they would be, and even the day I was most dreading – our Saturday seminar, of course – to be beneficial. While I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those people that plans their assignments out months in advance or finishes them weeks ahead of time, our repeated check-ins on our respective progress certainly made me more aware of and proactive towards deadlines.

Finally, despite my earlier melodramatic complaints about historiography, I genuinely enjoyed this module. My semester-long (and ongoing) project on the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 is the longest amount of time I have spent focusing on one specific topic, and instead of becoming bored with the flu, I’ve only become more interested. I’ve particularly appreciated the format of the class, and I feel like the discussion and collaboration helped me both in terms of my project and also in understanding transnational history. After years of sitting in lectures or classes in which the students did all of the listening and none of the speaking, I felt more like an adult and less of a high school student in our discussions. This module may not have been what I expected, but I think the tools I gained from it and the new understanding I have of transnational history made it very much worthwhile.  

There’s a lot to say about this module as it comes to an end. When I registered for it, I really hadn’t grasped just how new of an experience this would turn out to be for me. It really wasn’t what I thought it would be (honestly I don’t know what I thought it would be). I can’t deny that transnational history was a somewhat difficult topic to navigate in the beginning. This was probably due to several misconceptions I’d had about transnational history, the most notable of which being that transnational history was the same thing as international history. This is an idea which has certainly been corrected, but which I also had a hard time letting go of for probably the first 2 or 3 classes of this module. Nevertheless, I arrived in this module excited to do international history and I ended up with something totally different.

Transnational history wasn’t necessarily in my comfort zone of scholarship. Half the time I didn’t really think what I was doing even counted as transnational history. It wasn’t until I was getting ready to present my final project that I actually thought that I had something that was viable and that I could work with. You can’t imagine how many times I went back to Patricia Clavin because I was pretty sure I’d gotten myself off track again. In retrospect, I’m really grateful for the hurdles that I worked to jump. I think they made me a better history student. I’m glad that instead of writing essays about Nazi occupation–something that has been done more times than I can count–I was writing blog posts and project proposals about things that I had hand-picked because I felt they were historically fascinating and important to learn.

Without this module, I would never have known that Mexicali was built by a Chinese diaspora community. The border between the United States and Mexico was never an area that I associated with migration from third-party nations. This may sound bad, but I’d honestly figured the borderlands were a place few people ever wanted to live, especially since the militarization of the border on behalf of the United States. Looking at the borderlands for transnational elements was something I’d decided to do because it sounded more possible than connecting the entire Chicano community to transnationalism–evidence for this kind of exists, but not to an extent that I could write 5,000 words on it. It ended up turning out that all I really had to do to find what I wasn’t even necessarily looking for was turn to the 19th century global economy and read into how this facilitated migration. It turned out that these lines that demarcate territory can actually inspire the unique growth of civilizations. The rest came together like a puzzle, which is really the most satisfying way to do history at the end of the day and something that truly rarely happens to me.

The thing that I loved the absolute most about this class was that it wasn’t a scramble for evidence that backed up some sort of thesis that really wasn’t amazingly original. It’s not always the most easy thing to come up with original ideas in a modern history class. I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but modern history is REALLY popular nowadays and has been for decades. This class was more of a test in just how much history we can uncover for ourselves when it’s not readily available to us in a secondary source. I’ve had classes kind of like this before, but I rarely ever felt like I had actually succeeded in what I’d set out to do. This time, I felt like I really got into what I was trying to accomplish. Every time I found something new I was like oh, cool! It was really this class that gave me the feeling that made me understand why historians really love to do what they do.

Now that we have finished a full semester of transnational history, I am firmly convinced that traditional history is in some way lacking if it does not incorporate a transnational perspective. I also am somewhat amazed that my exposure to this way of analyzing history has come so late in my academic career. What is more, it is incredible to think that most history graduates will have gone through their entire university career without gaining any exposure to the topics that we discussed. This is something which we discussed at the unconference earlier in the semester (and disagreed about a lot!) and which I would like to explore further now. The question I wish to raise is whether transnational history should be taught as an integral part of the history curriculum, including at primary and secondary school level?

Let’s face it, our history education before coming to St Andrews was based almost entirely around the nation state. At A-Level, I studied a history of the Soviet Union, the history of post-unification Germany and Italian unification. All three of these topics are heavily ‘un-Transnational’. Take, for instance, Italian unification, which focused almost entirely on how a nation was built and how it interacted with other nations (for example, Austria, France and Britain). What is interesting is that within this, there would be countless networks that you could use to analyze the Risorgimento. Of course, there is some focus on the network of Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi, but there were also lots of freemason networks and other kinds of networks that could be included in this. However, I am not trying to say that we should not include nation-centred analyses, but rather that a national and transnational approach can be intertwined together. History curriculums could, say, examine the history of the nation state and its macro political and international history whilst also examining the individual actors and networks which comprise these broader processes.

Of course, if you were to include a transnational history curriculum in primary school, you would have to significantly modify the content in this course. Indeed, primary students may end up being put off history altogether if the teacher started talking about the complexities of Actor-Network Theory, strong and weak ties, and even Patricia Clavin’s ideas. One way in which you would have to modify the course to suit a much younger age range would be to have less of a theoretical approach to understanding transnational history and more of a practical, case-study focused approach. A class of primary school students would be much more interested in learning about postwar German guestworkers, the Singapore Mutiny and Lüderitzbucht than, say, Bruno Latour or Mark Granovetter. Another thing would be to bring out the micro and anecdotal aspect of transnational history into the curriculum by trying to introduce interesting transnational stories. The reading that comes to mind is Tonio Andrade’s piece which we read earlier in the semester. History could have more of a case-study focus which brings history to life in the imagination, something which I certainly felt when reading Andrade, perhaps my favourite piece of academic literature I have read during my whole time at St Andrews. We could also teach them about A Croatian Electrician, Two Army Officers, and a French Tennis Legend in order to help bring history alive!

Another important part of our transnational history course this semester that could be brought into school education could be all the different types of alternative learning which we experimented with this semester. I found the unconference idea to be a wonderful one and I think pair-writing could definitely be something that could be introduced in high schools (though I think getting them to meet on a Saturday like we did might be a bit of a stretch!). Another thing that could be introduced into the school system could be the blog post idea. What I found particularly useful about this was that it encouraged me to get into the habit of writing, whereas I previously tend to massively overthink things before I put pen to paper, I now feel more confident in just writing without even thinking about it. Why not also bring mapping and databasing into the school curriculum? History as a subject can very easily be criticized for not teaching students many practical skills. But, mapping and databasing goes hand-in-hand with transnational history and could really encourage students to pursue history beyond school. Moreover, if schools taught transnational history, I think they should also adopt the project idea which we are doing this semester. Many of my high school history classes involved just listening to teachers try and explain history to a class. I definitely think there needs to be more of getting students out there to research a part of history which they are actually interested in, rather than sticking to a set school curriculum. This kind of inquiry-based teaching would definitely help make primary and secondary school students more curious and develop personal interests in history.

So, what’s been the purpose of this post? It is partly to say that the primary and secondary school system should incorporate transnational history alongside national history. But, it is also to say how grateful I am that I have been exposed to transnational history (albeit maybe slightly too late in my academic career for my liking). It has encouraged me to think differently about how we as historians may wish to think about how we go about doing history and challenge our previous ideas about how history has to be focused around the nation. In many ways, I wish I had been encouraged to think in these terms earlier, even at primary school level, as it would have promoted my interest in history much more. So, yes, history at all levels should have a transnational focus.

My original idea for my big project proposal, way back in February, was to focus on pirates. I love reading about them, despite the fact that had I been on a ship under attack by them in their heyday (1630-1730, roughly) I probably would have been killed off fairly quickly, and I refused to see Captain Philips because I was convinced it would give me nightmares. Still, historic pirates are undeniably fascinating: groups of people from different nations and cultures, moving in borderless seas, living by their own codes and laws. They are, in my opinion at the very least, one of the most interesting groups of transnational actors in modern history.

I’m going to focus on a specific affiliation of pirates in this post. The historiography on pirates is slim, largely due to a sheer lack of sources: pirates were not usually the sort of people to become writers later in life, and even if they did, the successful amongst them (i.e. those who were not killed or jailed before the age of forty) would not be as stupid as to record their crimes for the world and authorities to see. However, the literature that does exist reveals the stereotypical examples of pirates acting as independent, free-willed actors (most notably the Barbary corsairs of the Mediterranean, or the Chinese pirates who plied the Pacific and Indian Oceans), alongside those who were allied through loose groups such as the Brethren of the Coast, a fraternity of sorts formed in the West Indies and united under a general desire for wealth and a dislike of Spain. The Brethren’s home base became the Bahama Islands, selected for their position in the shipping lanes between the New World and Europe. What has become Nassau today was once New Providence, a lawless city of transients. First brought under European control by a French-Spanish force before moving under English ‘control,’ New Providence was already an international town with a history of brutal violence.

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries presented a perfect storm for piracy in the West Indies. A number of transnational forces all played a hand in its rise. A highly unsteady situation across Europe (including the aftermath of religious wars in France, civil war in Britain, a war of independence in the Netherlands) had left the various powers struggling for wealth and power, and searching for it in new colonies abroad. Imperialism played an important role: without the colonies sprouting up across the Atlantic, there would be no ships sailing between North and Central America and the western European coast. Wherever the resulting new trade networks formed, pirates followed. The competition along these trade routes between various European powers allowed and even encouraged the Brethren. Piracy, illegal under all European powers’ laws, was legal if the pirate became a ‘privateer,’ or an armed vessel licensed to attack the vessels of a hostile country. By using privateers, France, England, Spain, and the Netherlands could attack each other via private contractors and thus circumvent the cost associated with maintaining a large navy. 

The Brethren was not only formed by a transnational network, it was composed of highly mobile and transnational actors. Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, for example, was born in Bristol, began his life at sea in Jamaica, and despite spending much of his career based in the West Indies, his name has been found among the public records of early Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas (he died in North Carolina while under attack by the Royal Navy). Pirate captain William Kidd was born in Scotland, moved to New York City immediately after it changed hands from Dutch to English, became a privateer in the Caribbean, married an English woman living in the colony of New York, and was executed by the English government following his return from the Indian Ocean. His international crew was led by his first mate Hendrick van der Heul, a man reportedly of African descent. Pirates were often indiscriminate in the nationalities of the ships they attacked, and were often hunted by more than one European power at a time.

Most of what we know about pirates has been heavily shaped by literature and pop culture: treasure maps, black ships, and ‘walking the plank’ all are inventions of Robert Louis Stevenson, for example. However I think they deserve a good deal more serious scholarly recognition than they currently receive. Pirates were both transnational in their targets and in those who targeted them – they were an unforgettable part of the trade networks that sprang up between Old and New Worlds, and were arguably the world’s first and most significant international criminals.

__________

Cordingly, David. Life Among the Pirates: The Romance and the Reality

Latimer, Jon. Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire. 

Lee, Robert Earl. Blackbeard the Pirate. 

A whole semester doing and practicing transnational history means that we’re bound to learn some things. I mean, that would be the hope, right? I’ve decided to make a note of the top 5 things that I think I’ve learnt over the course of this module – and to be honest, the range is much broader than I would have expected.

1. What is transnational history?

On a basic level, this module does what it says on the tin – I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about what the discipline of transnational history means, and also why it might be interesting or important. Historically, I think that we tend to focus on nations as a basic building block, and to construct discussions or arguments around them. That means that the spaces between nations (and the people that inhabit those spaces) can be easily overlooked. At a basic level, transnational history focuses on networks and exchanges of ideas across traditionally defined borders and boundaries to create a far wider scope for analysis.

2. What is transnationalism?

Those ideas apply beyond history as well – this module taught me that transnationalism isn’t just a historical concept, but can be found in many different academic fields, and even  in everyday life. Essentially, it encourages people to look beyond traditional ideas of nations or borders when viewing a problem. Instead, it emphasises the primacy of exchanges and dialogue across those borders, and the effects that they have. I really like this approach because it seems incredibly positive, emphasising that differences between people are largely created  by borders, rather than the other way around.

3. A different angle of analysis.

I think transnationalism is quite a drastic re-think in terms of how we approach history or any academic discipline. As a result, I think this module has also demonstrated the value of approaching problems from new and inventive angles. By re-framing a question with new or different units of analysis, information that was previously unimaginable can come to light. In terms of transnationalism, I think that this is particularly relevant to emphasising the actual human experience in the writing of history.

4. Evaluate your progress.

The fact that a requirement for this module was to blog regularly has been a blessing in disguise. On the one hand, yes, it is a hassle to have to try and blog every week. But on the other hand, it has meant that I have been constantly thinking about how I’ve been progressing in the module, and evaluating my ideas as I go. In the future, I want to maintain this habit by keeping a journal or a diary for any project that I work it. It will allow me to keep developing my ideas, while also meaning that I can look back on an ideas I had in the past as reference points.

5. Study what you care about.

Something that I’ve found really hard about studying at university has been the disconnect between the two things on which I spend most of my time – theatre, and academia. I have to clearly delineate between when I’m doing which one, and I’m having to switch between the two a lot. Which means I often don’t get to enjoy either. The fact that this module has allowed me to combine them both has meant that I’ve been working on two things that I’m incredibly passionate about in one project. I hope to continue this overlap with my dissertation, that will explore the presentation of history on stage.

Overall, I think that I’ve really taken a lot out of this module, and I’ll be giving it a solid recommendation to anyone that asks. And probable some people that don’t, if I’m honest.

Over the past couple weeks the direction of my project has taken a pretty significant shift in a new direction. As I began to narrow my geographical scope, I found that there is a lot of historical richness to be found in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands themselves. If you zoom in here, it’s easier to make assessments about the border and how people interact with and experience it. Not only this, but many of these histories can be placed into an interesting transnational framework. Take for example Tijuana.

A quick Google search can tell you that the city of Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico) was founded in 1889. What Google probably won’t as easily tell you is that Tijuana’s birth can be largely attributed to United States mining interests. Lawrence D. Taylor’s essay, titled ‘The Mining Boom in Baja California from 1850 to 1890 and the Emergence of Tijuana as a Border Community’ has been a valuable contributor to my research. Perhaps unbeknownst to Taylor, he has actually written a bit of a transnational history about Tijuana. This doesn’t seem to be his main intention, however, so I have taken it upon myself to draw on some of his work with my own ideas (which will perhaps further my understanding of how important transnational exchanges and flows were to shaping the borderland communities we know today).

In the three decades leading up to 1889, gold and silver veins were being discovered throughout the land that straddled the international border, resulting in a nearly constant gold rush of sorts throughout the area.[1] People began settling in the Tijuana River valley as early as the 1860s; note that, just as the valley itself spans both sides of the border, these agriculturally-driven settlers did as well.[2]

In addition to agricultural settlements, the valley was an important transit route for people moving between mining areas.[3] It wasn’t long before the Tijuana River valley was attracting so much cross-border movement that the Mexican government established a customs house to stimulate the accumulation of revenue from people crossing the border.[4] What Taylor has been getting at thus far, and what he does not explicitly voice, is that Tijuana’s initial social and economic development—developments which would arguably push it toward becoming a standalone city in the future—was formed as culmination of agricultural interests from both sides of the border, as well as flows of people throughout the area and across the border (I’m thinking about economic transnational activities in which goods and/or profit are obtained in Mexico and brought back into the United States).

In the 1880s, an international firm called The International Company of Mexico began selling pieces of the available land to people who wished to inhabit the Tijuana area.[5] I tried to research further into this company, but found it difficult to find much information without advanced resources. Taylor describes the company as a U.S.-Mexico firm.[6] Some further research revealed that it was an American company based in Connecticut.[7] Regardless, its interest in the land and the grant of land it received marks the beginning of a multitude of foreign countries obtaining and reselling the land to settlers. This is because all of this was occurring, of course, during a period when Mexican policy sought to develop Mexico further by encouraging foreign investment. Pieces of the land that would constitute many of the border communities toward the West (including Tijuana) were soon in the hands of American companies, and companies originating in England, France, and Germany.[8] 

It wouldn’t be long before the exoticism presented by Tijuana’s proximity to San Diego would stimulate a massive tourism boom to Tijuana–even if just to look at it. What ended up being my most important takeaway from researching Tijuana is how factors that pull people and interest toward the border can shape the formation of the borderlands and dictate how people experience living on the border. I’m hoping this will add a useful perspective to my project as I continue to work on it further.

[1] Lawrence D. Taylor, ‘The Mining Boom in Baja California from 1850 to 1890 and the Emergence of Tijuana as a Border Community’ in Andrew Grant Wood (ed.), On the Border: Society and Culture Between the United States and Mexico (Oxford, 2001), pp. 5-13.

[2] Ibid., pp. 14-15

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., p. 16.

[7] Robert R. Alvarez, Jr., Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800-1975 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1987), p. 30.

[8] Ibid., p. 29.