MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indian suffragettes : female identities and transnational networks, Sumita Mukherjee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found the exercise of pair writing very challenging, and there might be several reasons for that. Firstly, as I am still in the process of very early research for my essay, I felt that my ideas were not  formed enough to have anything to write. I still managed to get a few hundred words down: even though I don’t like them, the exercise has taught me that there is always something to write, and the sooner the better. Secondly, I think I was a bit too concerned about what my co-writer would think and understand, which prevented me from being as productive as I could have been. An additional challenge for me was language, as my first drafts are usually written in a kind of ‘frenglish’ which I did not want to impose on my co-writer. 

Despite these challenges, I found the process of discussing my work with George very interesting as he would ask quite simple questions to which I had not thought of, and which helped me to be more precise with my definitions and intentions.

I would now like to offer some feedback to George.

First of all, I feel like your project is on the right path: your question is well defined, and you already have a quite clear idea of your methods and sources. I find your idea of using an anthropological approach especially relevant in the context of this transnational history class. Indeed, it will enable you to ‘play with the scales’, focus on the individual or small community level and connect them to broader patterns, while freeing yourself from the national level. The national could still be included, but only as an element of context informing your analysis.

Secondly, about your fear of being too Eurocentric, I do not think that this is too much of an issue. Even though there is a tendency in the historiography to study other geographical regions, Europe is still a relevant topic of inquiry with a lot to be explored. However, as we said during our discussion, it might be a good idea to study peripherical European regions, such as Turkey or Russia, which could unveil some unknown connections or patterns that usually go unnoticed in studies about Western European countries.

Lastly, it would be interesting for you to reflect on the ‘added value’ of your project. By added value I mean, what does demonstrating that patterns of fears existed across different European countries tell us? What do you make of it? How can you use this conclusion to enlight our understanding of a particular period, geographical area, historical issue? You might have already thought about it but, if not, I feel that it would add a lot of strength to your project.

Here is an article I just found about the study of climate change from a people’s perspective: Pallavi V. Das, ‘People’s History of Climate Change’, History Compass, 16:11 (2018), pp.1-8. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12497

Even though climate change is not exactly your topic, I thought it might still be useful to understand how Das goes about researching and writing about people’s perceptions and fears.

Today, conflict and ‘law’ are inseparable. The ‘Hauge Laws’ regulate conflict, proscribing weapons which cause unnecessary suffering, as well as the targeting of civilians. These proscriptions can be traced to the 1868 preamble to the St Petersburg Declaration prohibiting explosive projectiles (Declaration), where they were first enumerated in an international treaty.[1] However, the Declaration is limited, particularly in its refusal to apply its protections to colonial wars.[2]

The Declaration succeeded in limiting arms, where similar attempts in 1816, 1832 and 1859-70 failed.[3] This is because its text satisfied two major conflicting political and intellectual philosophies of the time, military realism, and humanitarianism. These philosophies were shaped by diverse conceptions of modernity, legalism, racialised colonialism and nationalism, which spread in tandem with the growth of mass media and communicative technology.

This project will ask how the Declaration came to be formulated at the time, and in the manner that it was. Current scholarship mainly analyses the Declaration as a ‘staring point’ for developments in humanitarianism and international law.[4] In contrast, my research will study the intellectual and political debates which characterised its drafting, placing these in a transnational context. I shall research individual members of the drafting commission, who go almost undiscussed in current literature on the Declaration. This original ‘transnational’ focus on the political and intellectual origins of the Declaration, and the novel incorporation of individual drafters into the narrative of its creation, will provide a fresh perspective into how international humanitarian norms first emerged.

My driving questions are: Considering Russia possessed the most advanced explosive projectiles, why did it call a convention to prohibit them? Why did the attendant states agree to this, and why were certain states invited or excluded? Why did the Prussian representative try to broaden the Declaration’s prohibitions, despite pressure from a powerful Prussian lobby opposing legalistic restrictions on war? Why did Britain’s representative attempt to narrow the Declaration and prevent its application to colonies? And, to account for the criticisms that scholarship on humanitarianism has been unduly Eurocentric, how did Latin American and Asian influences shape the development of the humanitarian ideas within the declaration?[5]

I hypothesise that these questions can be answered by considering the growth (facilitated by technology and media innovations) of two antagonistic transnational phenomena. 1) The development of a web of actors in law, media and ‘global’ society (including Asia and Latin America) who, after the Crimean war, gained the political capital to effectively advocate for humanitarian and legal parameters to be placed on conflicts. This created the environment which allowed the Declaration to be proposed and for some delegates to push to codify new humanitarian ideals. 2) The parallel development of anti-legalist, ‘nationalist military realism’ and racialised colonialism, which inspired delegates to limit the Declaration through textual alterations and the exclusion of states from negotiations. The Declaration succeeded by incorporating elements of both positions, contrary to other disarmament proposals in 1816, 1832 and 1859-70.[6]

My position challenges paradigms which suggest that international legal norms were constructed solely by unitary states to maximise their relative military and economic power, without considering morality or ideology.[7] However, to account for this position, I will consider whether Russia designed the Declaration purely to prevent an economically damaging arms race and whether the Prussian calls to widen the treaty reflected an attempt to undermine it by broadening it unrealistically.[8] I expect the answers to these contentions to be no.

These hypotheses shall be tested using archival research and literature reviews. I shall scrutinise the letters and journals of delegates from Prussia, Russia and Britain. Then, I shall place them within a transnational context using recordings of the Declaration’s negotiations in combination with diplomatic letters, parliamentary proceedings, newspaper debates, the Red Cross archives, and the meeting records of ‘peace societies’ and other humanitarian groups. In studying developments in technology, modernity, legalism, colonialism and humanitarianism, I shall review and discuss secondary literature.

[1] Georg von Martens, New General Collection of Treaties, Conventions and other Remarkable Transactions (Göttingen, 1873), pp.450-473.

[2] Ibid., p.472.

[3] Scott Keefer, The Law of Nations and Britain’s Quest for Naval Security International Law and Arms Control: 1898 – 1914 (E-Book, 2016), pp. 16-17.

[4]  See James Crossland, War, Law and Humanity The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914 (London, 2018).

[5] Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Review of JAMES CROSSLAND. War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.’ American Historical Review, (2020), p.621.

[6] Keefer, Quest, p.16-17.

[7] See description of Morgenthau/Realism in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2001), pp.439-440.

[8] See Keefer, Quest, p.40.

Tourism is not only a major force within a country’s economy, but also vital within the Western cultural lifestyle. ^[1] Within Europe, tourism provided some reconstruction of normality after the tragedies of the Second World War.^[2]The twentieth century brought about new understandings of movement through borders and a new desire to venture away from one’s homeland, even within the ever-changing political landscape. Tourism is fundamentally a transnational idea, as it relies on the travel of people from one region to another, in search for the unknown and a divergence of the mundane.^[3]

I am interested in how the phenomenon of tourism continued to grow, even within the authoritarian regimes of postwar Europe. These governments saw the developing importance and reliance on tourism as a source of economic flow, as well as using it for the promotion of their country’s government to the rest of the world, convincing visiting citizens of their authority and legitimacy. This also came at a time when, after the war, world-wide tourism was becoming more accessible and the importance growing within Western culture. 

However, research today continues to be limited in how tourism is addressed, with historians focusing on one specific case study. This constraint forgets the inevitable transnationality of tourism as a subject, which becomes even more important when focusing on the different regimes around the world. Looking specifically at Spain during Franco’s regime and the Soviet Union will be beneficial in comparing not only nations under vastly different regimes, but also varying political ideologies. The need for tourism from an economic standpoint is just one factor in the reasons for creating and expanding tourist offices. What were the justifications in opening their borders to tourists, and how were they able to create the image of Francoism and Socialism, respectively, into a vision that would be accepted by the visitors? In other words, why was it a government initiative to pursue tourism, and what was done to create an image of the country that the regimes would allow the international public to see and experience? The importance of these questions also comes from the analysis of the response from the visiting public, was the government initiative successful in swaying public opinion?

By using a comparative transnational lens, I will work to uncover the reasons for a push toward international validation, and to see the universal importance of tourism, even within illiberal regimes. The importance of comparing the different political structures created to handle tourism is to create a picture of the global importance of leisure travel. In Spain, the Ministry of Information and Tourism was created in 1951 to “officially [recognize]” the growing need of “social and commercial activity.”^[4] The Soviet equivalent was called Inturist, created to sell socialism to the visiting public and hoping these ideas would transfer through tours of the Soviet sphere.^[5] The opening of their countries to foreigners helps explain the importance of the globalized world, and how it  became impossible to ignore the necessity of foreign support, especially when it came to validating the legitimacy of one’s government.

^[1] Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, “Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Approach”, in Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralph Schneider and Christopher Harvie (eds) The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000, (Hampshire, 2002), p. 1.

^[2] Sasha D. Pack, “Tourism and Political Change in Franco’s Spain”, in Nigel Townson (ed.), Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959-75, (London, 2010), p. 51.

^[3] Eric G.E. Zuelow, “The Necessity of Touring Beyond a Nation: An Introduction”, in Eric G.E. Zuelow (ed.) Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (London, 2011), p. 12.

^[4] Pack, “Tourism and Political Change in Franco’s Spain”, p. 53.

^[5] Shawn Salmon, “Marketing Socialism: Inturist in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s”, in Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (eds), Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism, (Ithaca, 2006), p. 187.