MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

Transnational history and Global history have commonly been mistaken as the same thing; this they are not, but it is important to consider their shared suspicion of monocausal and unilinear macro-explanations. Great strides have been made in building powerful, complex models of global historical structures, but global historians have, in the words of Tonio Andrade, “tended to neglect the human dramas that make history come alive”. Not only can the practice of ‘global microhistory’ help to populate models and theories with real people, it also allows the bringing of actors and agency back into the analysis- something that is usually missing in macro-social analysis of culture or societies. Macro processes are, after all, played out or experienced in much smaller units: within villages, institutions, families, or local streets.  But, is the question all about ‘balance’, as Andrade would argue, or is there something far more comprehensive about the level of historical analysis offered by ‘global microhistory’? Furthermore, how can this type of history present itself?

I would argue that this notion of ‘balance’ downplays the potential utility and importance of such a way of practicing history. Not only does it allow us as historians to fulfil our craft and the ethic of the discipline by working close to the primary sources, but it allows us to view particularly small-scale ‘events’ in a fresh light. If transnational history demands ‘a new way of seeing’, then empirical ‘global microhistory’ studies surely contribute to this body.

In her study of the Singapore Mutiny – an event most commonly researched through the prism of Singaporean national history – Heather Streets-Salter takes a seemingly ‘local’ event and argues very convincingly that both the causes of and responses to the mutiny demonstrate the global ties, relationships, and ideologies. She demonstrates the permeable nature of colonial boundaries, and, more specifically, the multiple influences at work on colonies in Southeast Asia outside of their relationship to their respective metropoles. By scrutinising a range of primary sources – a collection of contemporary newspaper reports, the ‘secret’ British enquiry into events, the ‘Official Line’ given by British authorities in the immediate aftermath – a complex picture emerges of the multilayered, dynamic and multidimensional integration of actors on both sides into the global world. What becomes apparent is the level of global interconnectedness, and an awareness of this by the actors themselves. Since ‘actors’ transcended traditional spatial realms, not fitting into neatly defined national histories, such analysis, when applied to other spheres, could prove to offer broader explanations, incorporating multiple layers of scope.

Ultimately, though, questions of accessibility and utility should be posed. As expressed in an earlier post, it is the duty of historians to reach out and engage a broader public. While there is a relatively clear audience for national histories, it is more difficult to define one for transnational history. Who needs or wants transnational history? What is its ‘utility’ in the modern world? I would sympathise with Andrade, in that ‘global microhistory’, with its lens of focus on a small, often human entity, would actually make these books fun to read, exciting even. Such histories are sure to engage a wider public, interweaving an interesting narrative while answering ‘big’ historical questions.

As far as ‘utility’ goes, Streets-Salter has pithily drawn the conclusion that local was also very often the global. This, she applied to the world since the early modern period. With even longer (and more numerous) strands of interconnection brought about by the advent of mass communication to broader swathes of populations in the twenty-first century, we are reminded that our own actions take place within this global entanglement.

It is my assertion that looking at the exchange and discourse between European art, with an emphasis on French and German artists, German culture was revived. Through dOCUMENTA’s aims to regenerate the traditions of modernism and German modernist art, the exhibition acted in opposition to what had been deemed degenerate art from 1933-1945. The context of the first dOCUMENTA situates the exhibition in the post-war, post-Nazi era as a response to the enforced anti-modernist Nazi hegemony of the previous decades. dOCUMENTA emerged in an era faced with the challenge of resituating German identity with modernity. Walter Haftmann said of dOCUMENTA 1’s intention, “It should be seen as a broad, if initial attempt, to regain international contacts across the board and thus at home re-engage in a conversation that has been interrupted for so long, as it were.” This interruption he refers to is the separation of artistic discourse that has existed mainly between France and Germany. The Franco-German border represents an “underground connection”, a pact he describes central to the evolution of abstract art. It is this cultural exchange between French and German artists that needed to continue and became the focal point of dOCUMENTA in order to reinstate Germany into the “European whole” by way of modes of art representative of political and individual freedoms.

The exhibition featured artists from seven European nations, but had the largest collection of German and French artists (fifty-eight Germans, forty-two French). The artists included in dOCUMENTA 1 reflect on their experience of modernity, and ultimately situate Germany within the context of abstract art’s expressiveness and graphic language that promotes internationalism. The question I propose is how fundamental was modernity to West Germany’s reintegration, and how were these modernist values represented in the revival of Franco-German discourse at dOCUMENTA 1?

It was necessary to the founders to regenerate the memory of Germany’s past and traditions of European modernism. The thread of modernity seems to be running through my project and uniting the various agents involved. They are a part of the modern experience, and with this exhibition modernism and internationalism become central to West German identity. The word “dOCUMENTA” itself was chosen because it was a symbol of transnationality, the name is an invented word that emphasizes how each exhibition will reinvent itself and to be a documentation of modern art. It is important to remember that the turning toward art as a means of self-identification belongs to a bourgeois/elite class and cannot be said to apply to the entirety of the population. But I hope to show how modernist values in art, such as the freedom of the individual and expression of this, art as self-reflection, and rejection of the artistic canon, became a part of reaffirming German values in culture.

dOCUMENTA 1, created by Kassel-born artist Arnold Bode and art historian Walter Haftmann in 1955, situates the exhibition in Kassel, West Germany. Kassel was chosen by Kassel-born found Arnold Bode as the site of what has become one of the world’s most renowned international contemporary art exhibitions, but the location presents an interesting series of questions regarding the city’s significance within German reintegration. Kassel was largely destroyed in WWII, and even the Museum Fridericianum sustained heavy damage, which to the benefit of the exhibition’s organizers elevated the industrialist-minimalist aesthetics of the exhibition’s display. Kassel is a city bearing the scars of German history, and what can this mean within the greater sphere of reforming identity? It is the intention of the exhibition’s organizers, in keeping with their mission to revisit German history, to locate a politically neutral territory that situates the exhibition within a reflection of German history. It both acknowledges and accepts this history as informing the works presented.

Further investigation of the subject matter will reveal the transnational links across the Franc-German border, and how these connections manifested in artistic production of the first half of the twentieth century, with a specific emphasis on the post-war era. It is important to understand the origin and implication of the first dOCUMENTA, and the political context it emerged in. This is one of the first international contemporary art exhibitions, so it is important to question why it was created specifically then, why what purpose, and analyze the farther reaching affects of such an institution on German character and identity.

The cultural, political, and social changes of 1920s North America present the historian with a rich tapestry from which to draw inspiration. Rapid urbanization was accompanied by the rise of the speakeasy, the advent of jazz, and the origins of organized crime, helmed by such notorious figures as Al Capone. And the background to these processes in the USA was Prohibition, lasting from 1920 to 1933. Of course, the thirst for alcohol among millions of Americans remained throughout this period, and many were quick to recognise the potential riches that were on offer, if alcohol could be supplied.

As a result, Prohibition prompted the rise of the bootlegger, or alcohol smuggler. Writing in April 1923, William McNulty estimated that 1 million bottles a week were brought into the USA during the previous year.[1] Europe and the Caribbean were important suppliers, but the vast majority of imported alcohol came south, from Canada. What’s more, an estimated 75% of all liquor supplied to the USA during Prohibition, entered across the Detroit River, St Clair River, and Lake St Clair, a mere 135km stretch.[2] I therefore used this geographic lens as an entry point for my further research.

There are a number of reasons why the volume of smuggling between Ontario and Michigan was so high. The Damon Act had prohibited alcohol in Michigan since 1917, so there was a history of alcohol smuggling from both Ohio & Canada. Furthermore, the Detroit River is narrow and dotted with inlets and islands, making it easy to evade Prohibition enforcers, and when the river froze, bootleggers could drive back and forth with astonishing ease. Huge supplies of whisky were also readily available on the Canadian side of the border, in distilleries such as Hiram Walker’s. The city of Detroit acted as the perfect node from which to distribute alcohol to many of America’s major urban centres. By the late twenties the predominantly Jewish Purple Gang were in the ascendancy amongst Detroit bootleggers, ruling the city through violence and intimidation, and supplying whisky to Capone’s Chicago outfit. Equally significant though, was the self proclaimed “King Canada”, Blaise Diesbourg, whose operations just across the river in Windsor brought him both enormous prosperity, and great notoriety.

Even from this early analysis, it becomes apparent that it is not only possible but necessary to view illegal alcohol smuggling, an inherently transnational activity, through a dual American-Canadian lens. Canadian political measures offer an intriguing counterpoint to those of the USA. All but one of the Canadian provinces abandoned Prohibition during the 1920s. What’s more, the Canadian government later in the decade introduced a scheme of government distribution, having deduced that complete Prohibition was ineffective. Commentators of the time offered fascinating insights into the relationship between the two countries, but in subsequent decades this was neglected, as Prohibition became central to the American national narrative. As part of this project I will seek to reframe bootlegging, not as part of the American phenomenon of Prohibition, but within the broader US-Canadian border processes of the time.

There is extensive secondary literature which will be valuable in guiding my thoughts, some of which I have begun to explore. S. T. Moore’s Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland is an inspiring analysis of bootlegging in British Columbia, which recognizes the permeability of the border as an inescapable theme. Other works such as Philip Mason’s Rumrunning and the Roaring Twenties: Prohibition on the Michigan-Ontario Waterway, will also be hugely informative. The digitised archives available through the library offer a wealth of journal articles from across the period, while the Library of Congress allows access to American newspapers up to 1922. Even a cursory glance at the Michigan newspapers of the early twenties reveals the extent to which Prohibition was, as Leuchtenburg puts it, “the most avidly discussed question of the day.”[3] I have also been able to find similar contemporary Canadian sources, which will be useful in providing the balanced analysis I hope to achieve. Records from the bootleggers themselves are, of course, not available.

I have, therefore, framed my research intentions with the availability of sources as a major consideration. While I cannot be sure of the extent of bootlegging activity, I can be sure of how the bootleggers and their activities were framed within public debate of the time. Making heavy use of newspaper and journal sources from both sides of the Michigan-Ontario border, this project will aim to analyse the place of the bootlegger in the public sphere of the borderland.

[1] McNulty, William J. ‘Smuggling Whisky from Canada,’ Current History (New York) 18.1 (Apr 1, 1923) p. 123

[2] http://blogs.detroitnews.com/history/1999/06/14/how-prohibition-made-detroit-a-bootleggers-dream-town/

[3] Leuchtenburg, William, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-32 (Chicago and London, 1958) p. 235

Football is inherently defined by the concept of well defined nation states. Clubs play in national leagues that feed into national teams that compete against other nations at the World Cup. Occasionally, however, clubs break this mould and appear to represent an identity that is a little less straightforward. Teams such as Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona have become cultural institutions that go beyond traditional notions of the nation. Glasgow Celtic perhaps fit this role the best – an Irish club playing in Scotland that seems to embody both Scottishness and Irishness at the same time, yet also sits in between these two identities. In many ways Celtic is a club for, and founded by, an inherently transnational people. Founded in 1888 to put food on the tables of poor Irish immigrants in the East End of Glasgow, Celtic has become the identity for a people who were without an identity, detached from their homeland of Ireland and stuck in the often hostile sectarian environment of the West Coast of Scotland. Through the lens of the football club, one can begin to visualize the historic links between Scotland and Ireland, catalysed by the immense movement of people, religious and political ideas in the 19th Century.

Through Celtic, then, we can begin to see how the people and politics of Ireland and Scotland have been inextricably linked. These links are also evident in the history of Belfast Celtic. Belfast Celtic were founded in 1891 as a club for Catholics in Belfast and shared a healthy relationship with their Glaswegian counterparts until, in 1948, sectarian violence forced them to dissolve. In the 57 years prior, they had shared many links with Glasgow Celtic, embodying a similar ethos, a somewhat shared fan-base, a shared culture, and shared players.

This shared ‘Celtic’ identity between Scots-Irish and Catholics in Ulster highlights a wider shared sphere of influence and a shared cultural identity that was not divided by the Irish Sea. It is within this shared sphere that we can observe several transnational actors that link the two clubs, and by extension, the Catholic populations of the two industrial cities of Belfast and Glasgow.

Firstly, we can observe sectarianism, initially imported into Scotland from Ireland, crossing back and forth across the Irish Sea between the two clubs and the two sets of people. The fierce derby between Belfast Celtic and Linfield – the staunchly Protestant and Unionist team in Belfast – became essentially a proxy-derby of the infamous Glasgow Old Firm between Glasgow Celtic and Rangers. These two rivalries did not exist in a vacuum, but rather fuelled each other. The 1948 riot between fans of Belfast Celtic and Linfield was mirrored in the 1952 riot between Glasgow Celtic and Rangers – a point not lost on commentators at the time. The regrettable consequence of the nature of football in this part of the world is that such a phenomenon informs us not just of sporting allegiances, but also of the transnational nature of prejudice. Hatred does not stop at national borders: to understand sectarianism in Scotland, you must widen your horizons to consider the influence of sectarianism in Ireland.

Secondly, in examining the two clubs, we can observe the sharing of cultural and religious identity between the two Catholic populations. Both clubs and both sets of fans shared a commitment to Irish Nationalism as well a strong and unwavering Catholic identity. As with the case of sectarianism, these identities did not exist separately of each other. Both sets of fans swapped imagery, songs and slogans, collaboratively creating an identity not just for the Scots-Irish, but also for Catholics in Ulster who had faced similar prejudices. If you watch Celtic play today, you will visit the stadium, affectionately named ‘Paradise’ and hear the fans sing ‘The Celtic Song’ – all cultural borrowings from Belfast Celtic. Again, this specific example of footballing culture highlights a wider shared culture and identity, crossing the Irish Sea.

Finally, we can observe human transnational actors. The two teams shared fans – whether it be those who crossed over from Belfast to Glasgow to watch games, or those in Glasgow who subscribed to Irish newspapers to keep up with Irish Politics and, perhaps more importantly, the Belfast Celtic score. Players such as Charlie Tully and Willie McStay played for both clubs, becoming not just footballing icons, but cultural icons for the two communities in the impoverished industrial cities of Glasgow and Belfast. To the hundreds-of-thousands who had crossed the Irish Sea looking for work, or escaping famine and oppression, individuals such as Tully represented the very embodiment of the Scots-Irish community.

The aim of this project, then, is to place the Scots-Irish community in a wider sphere, to show that they were interacting with – and integral to – a wider Catholic culture and community across the Irish Sea.

In this essay, I intend to portray a transnational history of the territory of Neutral Moresnet that demonstrates its nature as being representative of wider trends taking place in the multinational region of Lotharingia.

The territory of Neutral Moresnet, a small triangular territory, located at the modern-day tri-border point between the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, was given neutral status and a degree of autonomy at the end of the Congress of Vienna in the interest of the Balance of Power, a concept that was of prime importance in European geopolitics in 1815, and indeed for most of the nineteenth century. As no agreement reached over whether the Kingdom of the Netherlands or the Kingdom of Prussia would receive the territory including a strategically-important zinc spar mine, the territory surrounding the mining town of Kelmis was left out of the agreements surrounding the congress, and it stayed neutral until 1914, when it was occupied by Germany in the First World War. Following the war, the territory was quietly ceded to Belgium. However, during its relatively short history, there were a number of events that took place within this small territory that make it something of a microcosm of the region surrounding it, and a mirror of trends taking place in the surrounding area during the nineteenth century. A series of quasi-nationalistic expressions, for example, were expressed by Moresnetians during the century: In 1848, local coins were minted, though they were not the official currency of the territory, which used French francs. In 1883, a tricolour flag was designed, and in 1886, local stamps were printed – a seemingly unnecessary public service in a country containing just one small town. In 1908, after the zinc mine was exhausted in 1885, the town’s doctor, Wilhelm Molly, proposed turning Neutral Moresnet into the world’s first Esperanto-speaking state, giving it a national language, and the townspeople were given free lessons, a rally was held, a national anthem was written in Esperanto, and the town was renamed Amikejo. The World Congress of Esperanto named Neutral Moresnet the world capital of the Esperanto community that same year.

It can be tempting, however, to simply dismiss the history of Neutral Moresnet as an interesting Wikipedia page, but an inconsequential footnote within a wider historical (and specifically transnational) conversation. As mentioned earlier, the events that took place in Neutral Moresnet were representative of wider, transnational trends taking place across Europe during the ‘long nineteenth century’, and more specifically in the area which can be called Lotharingia: the Rhineland, Alsace-Lorraine, Belgium and the Netherlands. Besides the circumstances of its birth, rooted in the dominant geopolitical concept of the Balance of Power, Moresnet’s nationalistic expressions are responses to the Nationalism that swept across the surrounding area – see the independence of Belgium in 1830, or the revolutions of 1848, which took place over most of Europe, including Belgium, Germany and France, or the development of German nationalism until 1871. This trend manifests itself in Neutral Moresnet in the invention of a Moresnetian national identity, of coins, a flag, and a national language. This last point of language also offers an interesting dichotomy – Esperanto, an internationalist constructed language being used for a nationalistic purpose seems somehow wrong, but I would argue that the adoption of this language, as well as the adoption of national symbols, were an attempt by Neutral Moresnetians to assert their relevance, legitimacy and modernity in Europe as citizens of a small, semi-autonomous and now resource-poor state subject to several attempts at repatriation into either the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany over the course of its century-long history.

Neutral Moresnet’s intriguing, oddball nature, as well as a relative lack of historical inquiry into it is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it offers me a lot of freedom in pursuing this topic, but on the other, there is somewhat of a dearth of academic literature, at least in English, for me to work off of. However, I think that Neutral Moresnet’s transnational nature, location at the confluence of three language zones and strong connection to the trends and forces that shaped nineteenth-century Europe make it an ideal location for an essay in transnational history, and I’m very much looking forward to writing it.

The sport of football has become a worldwide phenomenon. Millions of children and adults alike passionately take part in casual street matches or organized leagues all around the world, and on the weekends, those same people and others attend professional football matches in person or watch them on television or through the internet. The fact that the game itself has spread across the globe is impressive enough, but the extent to which football has risen to becoming arguably the world’s biggest and grandest spectator sport in the world merits a thorough investigation. So, the main question to be addressed in this project is how the sport became so popular around the world as a spectator sport.

The nature of football as a spectator sport became inherently transnational over time: players began to cross national borders to sign with clubs based in different countries than their homeland, clubs have travelled the world to compete in matches or entire competitions against teams from or representing other countries, and the media and eventually supporters have followed the teams into foreign countries. Information in the form of match reports and styles of play crossed borders too, and even by the early 1930’s one could say that to an extent established networks connected the footballing world around the globe. Technology too played a significant role, as it acted as the agent that carried the sport and information about it around the world. The first international tours and international competitions would not have been possible without a improved and more frequent means of transportation like the steamship or passenger train lines, and the traveling journalists could not have covered the teams or competitions that they were following without the use of the telegraph or the telephone.

An key avenue into examining these aspects can be found in the tours of European and South American clubs in the early 20th century, some of the earliest official encounters between clubs from different nations. The likes of Glasgow Rangers (Scotland), West Ham United (England), and Hakoah Vienna (Austria) toured Europe and even, in Hakoah Vienna’s case, the United States. These clubs also came into contact with South American clubs such as Boca Juniors (Argentina), Montevideo Nacional (Uruguay), and Paulistano FC de São Paolo (Brazil), who all toured Europe in the 1920s. These tours were closely followed by the press, demonstrating that the matches between these clubs were meaningful to more than who was watching it on the day.

In order to place this project in the context of the scholarship that has already been published, I intend to continue examining the existing secondary literature written about football. Franklin Foer’s 2004 book, How Football Explains the World led me to raise many of the questions relating football to globalization and transnational history that I wish to address in this project, as did David Goldblatt’s in-depth study published in 2008, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, which I will examine in more detail as part of my research. The Journal of Global History released in 2013 an entire issue dedicated to the examination of sport and its place in global history, and Paul Dietschy produced an article in that issue tracing the roots of the rise of global football and its international governing body, FIFA. Dietschy’s article in particular prompted me to consider primary sources such as newspaper articles to examine the tours of the Interwar Years in greater detail. As of now, my intention is that the project will be anchored by primary sources in order to build off of the existing secondary literature. I will also examine, when appropriate, primary sources in Spanish and German, as I read both moderately well.

My aim for the project is to produce a concise, detailed investigation into this broader question of the rise of football as a spectator sport in the context of transnationalism. My project will include the written component, a visual component (images), and a mapping component, the last part being of particular importance, as I hope to map out the existing networks forged and sustained by the footballing world.

(Apologies for forgetting to upload this last week)

After the Unconference on Saturday, February 14th , I was amazed by how successful the day had been. The setup and running of a pair programming format was extremely useful for shaping my ideas while receiving input from fellow students. It allowed me to finally start narrowing down a topic, though there still is a great way to go, and engage with many of the questions produced by my topic.

Initially my proposal for a topic centered around dOCUMENTA 11, an international contemporary art exhibition in 2002 that was organized around themes of migration and globalization with the aim of creating a borderless space and “becoming transnational subjects” in a post-colonial age. Konrad raised the relevant issue that this topic is perhaps too contemporary to have any historical significance yet, and I agreed that it had been one of my concerns. At his suggestion I turned to the earlier workings of the exhibition, created in Kassel, 1955, as a way of analyzing the contemporary issues and identity of the exhibition but within a historically turbulent time. Essentially I’m using the same approach to contemporary art but within a more historical setting.

The 1955 premiere of Documenta, which to this day remains one of the foremost international contemporary art exhibitions, emerged in the post-war, post-Nazi era as a response to the enforced anti-modernist Nazi hegemony. Social realism reigned during the years 1933-1945 and suppressed expressions of individuality and political statements within art. Documenta was conceived as a way to reconnect German identity to modern art/international modernity and remove it from its Nazi past. Eurocentrism prevailed before and during the war, but Documenta 1 sought to create a sphere within which art was able to connect international ideas beyond favoured Eurocentric works. Though the details of the exhibition have to be fleshed out, future research and questions to be asked that will situate this exhibition as a transnational subject matter include determining where the featured artists were from – are they migratory? What is the interplay between West and East German subjects? How was this exhibition reconnecting German peoples with international contacts? In addition, specifically what artistic influences are on display in the work premiered? What cultures and societies are being represented? How successful is the exhibition in reconciling German identity with international modernity?

That is the first paragraph from my writing as the “driver” in the pair programming, which I think presents a broad set of questions needing to be addressed by my further research. The exhibition functions as an entry point into the transnational, and within that sphere I will aim to determine how vital the exhibition was to West Germany’s reintegration into the West.

Sources

dOCUMENTA 11: http://www.documenta11.de/archiv/d11/data/english/index.html

dOCUMENTA 1: http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/documenta/

Having initially brought a proposal of travellers in South-East Asian port cities to the table for discussion at the unconference, I was able to test different approaches, and experiment with prospective angles in this free-flowing space. The discussions I had, together with questions I posed to myself after the event, led me down quite a different path from the start of the day. Through reading parts of Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith’s new edited collection, Sites of Asian interaction (2014), I became fascinated by this notion of the ‘Asian Underground’.

This underworld, outside of the traditional confines of ‘empire studies’, represented a semi-colonial periphery with no clear boundaries. The seamless migration from city to city, and rural to urban, meant that people were constantly reinventing themselves. These were shared sites where people met, shared their own experiences, living beyond notions of ethnicity or national character.  Thinkers ‘saw a vision of free Asia’. As anti-imperialists began to move across the interstices of empire, they became specialists of this underworld and shared skills. Worldliness was a set of tools that people could take from city to city as they moved ‘through this urban continuum’. This world has rarely been studied, but what is striking is the mix of eclecticism, independence, and anti nationalism.

Reading about this ‘Asian Underground’ only left me with more questions. How did anti-colonial ideas flow in South and Southeast Asia? More importantly, how connected were these ‘radical networks’? And in what ways? Why do these connections matter? How ‘flat’ were the borders between colonial empires?

With these questions in mind, I chanced upon the incident of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese owned steamship, chartered by ‘Punjabi Sikhs’ from Indian communities right across the China seaboard, setting sail from Hong Kong to Vancouver, via Japan. The intention of this voyage in 1914 was to highlight the exclusionary laws in Canada and the United States. The ship was not permitted to dock in Vancouver, and was turned back, eventually terminating at Calcutta. The incident became something of a cause célèbre for the Ghadar Party in India, but also for wider anti-colonial, pan-Asian movements in general. It is often cited as a catalyst for the Singapore Mutiny in 1915, an event in itself that Japanese historian, Sho Kuwajima, has argued was ‘a turning point of [the] Modern History of Asia’.

With Tim Harper having established how far radical networks needed others to connect with each other, I would like to launch an investigation into the connections, ideas, and movements of some of these ‘pan-Asianist’ figures. The opportunity to chart webs of interconnection, as well as maps to trace itineraries is a particularly interesting one. The use of the term ‘pan-Asianist’ is obviously problematic, because it meant different things to different people, but as an anticolonial term, one should consider its use to be ascribed to thinkers who sought a post-colonial vision outside of the confines of the nation-state paradigm.

There are, no doubt, many challenges to face, particularly the question of primary sources. However, I believe this project will be hugely valuable as we reassess questions of anti-colonial movements and connections in twentieth century Asia, as well scrutinising the notion of imperial ‘control’ and ‘spheres of influence’.

See: Tim Harper & Sunil Amrith (ed.) Sites of Asian interaction (2014)

In the days since the ‘Unconference’ I have been exploring the possible developments of my ideas surrounding transnational alcohol smuggling into the USA during Prohibition. What I have found are a wealth of both primary and secondary sources, convincing me that a project in this area has the potential to be both rewarding and extremely interesting.

My general interest in the topic required refining, and the idea of focusing on a particular cross-border flow seemed to offer the chance to look transnationally, rather than merely incorporating bootlegging into the American national narrative surrounding Prohibition. It will allow me to focus on the reflective nature of these transnational flows, analysing the impacts of US Prohibition on not one but two societies, as well as on the intermediary actors, the bootleggers themselves.

With this in mind I sought to establish where the most statistically significant flows of alcohol were. Inspired by Connor’s story of whisky being hosed across the Detroit River, I focused my attention on the short stretch of border between Lakes Huron and Erie. An article from the Detroit News suggested that some 75% of all liquor supplied to the USA during Prohibition, entered across the Detroit River, St Clair River, and Lake St Clair, a mere 135km stretch.[1] The geography of these waterways, narrow and dotted with inlets and islands, made them a smugglers dream, while the city of Detroit acted as the optimum centre for alcohol distribution to the cities of the Midwest and the East Coast. The context on the Canadian side provided further incentive for the Michigan bootleggers. Huge supplies of whisky were available from government protected distilleries such as Hiram Walker’s, situated directly across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.

By narrowing my geographical focus, I immediately found myself recognising the value of the transnational approach. Further research has revealed that Canadian laws regarding alcohol offer a fascinating counterpoint to US Prohibition, as Ontario repealed Prohibition in 1923, and most other provinces followed later in the decade. Whether Canadian laws had any major impact on bootlegging activities is a point for further research. Initial exploration in the digitised archives available through the library has revealed a wealth of newspapers and periodicals from the time, confirming that Prohibition and bootlegging were not only major topics of public and academic debate at the time, but have remained so in the decades since.

This week I stumbled across a dissertation entitled Bootlegging and the Borderlands: Canadians, Americans, and the Prohibition-Era Northwest, by S. T. Moore. I have now requested the expanded book version (Bootleggers and Borders: The Paradox of Prohibition on a Canada-U.S. Borderland) on interlibrary loan. Moore argues that Prohibition and its enforcement on the Canada-US border has more to do with social ties than diplomatic relations, and takes a borderland approach in order to highlight the greater importance of north-south relations in North America, than those between east and west. Moore’s focus is on British Columbia, where cross-border connections are particularly close, but as he comments, his study serves as a microcosm of the broader relationship between Canada and the USA.[2] With this in mind, and with an array of primary sources at my fingertips, I will seek to develop a study of how bootlegging in the Detroit River area fits into the Canadian-American border processes of the Prohibition era.

[1] http://blogs.detroitnews.com/history/1999/06/14/how-prohibition-made-detroit-a-bootleggers-dream-town/

[2] Moore, S. T. Bootlegging and the Borderlands: Canadians, Americans, and the Prohibition-Era Northwest (The College of William and Mary, Virginia, 2000)