MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

I have been engaging with more theoretical discourses regarding the construct of ‘the nation’ along with its main counterparts, nationalism and national identity. The fluidity of the term across disciplines, particularly international relations, has proven to be a bit difficult to navigate as I conduct my research. The postmodernist aspect of my project does not help to simplify these issues either. Although, revisiting Mary Fulbrook’s Historical Theory has been quite helpful in grounding myself in a fundamental understanding of historical agents, sources, structures and outlooks in wider historiographical contexts; it is quite comforting to acknowledge that the historian has no way of avoiding a specific conceptual category of analysis (Fulbrook, p. 80). By recognizing the artificial construction of terminology dominant in historical writing, a more informed deconstruction and understanding of ‘the nation’ as a historical phenomenon is allowed. I have thoroughly enjoyed Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism as it engages with different approaches to the term ‘nation’, particularly delineating the relationship between nationalism and national identity. I had previously not considered the implications of an a priori and a posteriori perspective of nation-building, which now leads me to question how deeply I should go into researching discourse regarding national consciousness in Belarus and Ukraine. Hobsbawm’s book exemplifies the unreliability of attributing nationalism as the driving force or precursor of ‘nation’ through the collapse of the Soviet Union, as nationalism was a beneficiary of the establishment of the states – not the instigator. 

 My short essays focus on the methodological issues related to ‘the nation’ as a unit of analysis in transnational history has helped to indicate some of the broader historiographical issues associated with the nation-state and nationalism. I have gained a greater appreciation for the transnational perspective as it does aim to mitigate some of the gaps prevalent in the historical tradition of ‘the nation’. Interacting with different scales addresses the requirement of analysing the nation from ‘below’ in order to understand its construction from ‘above’. 

In regards to the postmodernist historiographical aspect of my project, much of the scholarship on ‘the nation’ I have read for my short essay ties in nicely with some of the facets of postmodernism I am working with. Although, I am a bit daunted by the language aspect as I am realizing I will be dissecting a discourse (what is ‘nation’) within an even more complex discourse (what is ‘language’). I am particularly interested to see how the postmodernist historiography of power structures plays into terminology such as ethnicity and nationality and its application in Ukrainian and Belarusian scholarship. 

There is a clear link between non-human and transnational history as looking at the non-human cuts across many of the categories which humans impose, such as the nation which form the basis for narrow studies of history. There is a long tradition of studying geographical features, and areas in history and transnational history is often based on networks which operate across these such as trade networks in a particular ocean. Environmental history has led to studies of what Andreas Malm calls climate in history which look at the impact on human history of climate events. An example of this is the case of the description of the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland. Such studies fit in to transnational history because their effects are felt across borders. Similar to the aims of other forms of transnational history the approach interrogates existing chronologies by using a different narrative centred on a non-human event and by creating the sense of simultaneous time across boundaries. It also challenges narratives based on centre and periphery which are built on human power structures. An alternative centre and periphery could be suggested by the immediate geographical impact and the wider impact as in the case of the Laki volcano with its lava flows and ash cloud. Andreas Malm refers to another type of history: history in climate. This would ask questions about how humanity has impacted climate and when this process began. Malm suggests this approach is of interest because one could investigate alternatives routes not taken that would not have led to a climate crisis and one could apportion blame and suggest motivation for the process which led to the crisis. Jason Moore’s articles also focus on the processes which caused the crisis, but rather than focussing on the use of fossil fuels as Malm does he highlights the importance of the early modern period of European expansion and suggests capitalocene as an alternative term to Anthropocene which better captures the origins of the crisis: specifically in the capitalist system rather than the vague reference to human responsibility.

I took John Clarke’s History of Environmentalism module last year. We read a few interesting pieces that I found to be relevant to this week in Transnational history. Sophie made an interesting point regarding how easy it is to forget that the ways in which we visualise the borders and landscape of various nations are constructed. This point reminded me of a few fascinating concepts I learned about last year in John’s module. After the Revolutionary War, the United States was desperate to culturally define itself in contrast to its European counterparts. Romantic images of wilderness and vast terrains were spread by novelists, poets, painters, and explorers during the early years of America’s independence. There was an almost frantic effort to label themselves as the nation with unmolested, virgin land. Nature and the vast expanse of wilderness was that focal point. Wilderness, therefore, became the centre of literary and artistic expression.

Conservationism, preservationism, and the current environmentalist movement all have their foundations to some extent in the maintenance of America’s natural grandeur – the wilderness that served as America’s first cultural identifier. I only ever approached this thought from a settler-colonial theoretical perspective—American national identity grew at the expense of indigenous history, culture, and identity erasure. I never thought about this piece from a transnational perspective as I have only written about wilderness in the context of North America. It is interesting to look at ‘wilderness’ in terms of boundaries and the international definition of self. The United States created the concept of ‘wilderness’ (a place devoid of human touch) to separate itself from Europe. Europe had thousands of years of artists, poets, and other magnificent cultural traditions that young America could not emulate. They, therefore, used ‘wilderness’ to separate themselves from the rest of the Western world and give themselves a cultural background previously non-existent. The concept of ‘wilderness’ has played a huge role in my dissertation and honours studies since John’s class and it is very interesting to look at it from a transnational perspective now.

This week’s readings were extremely interesting and surprising to me in a few ways. In terms of the draft article, I was surprised that I had never heard of Laki considering last year, while on a study abroad placement in Oslo, Norway, I took an environmental history class (with Prof Dominik Collet, who’s actually cited in the article) but I do not recall it ever being mentioned. Even being in a region Laki is supposedly more known in, it was never a name I heard mentioned… However, the way in which this chapter dealt with the interdisciplinary aspects of climate and culture was extremely interesting as reminded me of Prof Collet’s work on famine and the Little Ice Age and understanding human-environment interactions particularly be blending so called ‘archives of nature’ and ‘archives of man.’ 

The transnational lens in which the article took was also extremely interesting to me, particularly because it got me thinking a lot about borders and boundaries, and how easy it is sometimes to forget about the fact that nations and the way we visualise the world is completely man made. The idea that nature, and in this case sulfuric ash, is completely unaware and undeterred by these boundaries was an interesting thought, particularly when at times it can feel like it truly is the age of the Anthropocene. Laki and its wide encompassing impacts forced scientists and geologists and astrologists to become aware of what was happening in other parts of the world. It’s funny how inward facing we can be as societies until something seemingly inexplicable happens.  

To be honest, this article, particularly its final sentiments on the reporting of climatic events happening in other parts of the world, reminded me a lot of the early days of the pandemic when news was subsumed in trying to understand the new virus, how it had begun to impact people in more and more places and how we endeavoured to jointly connect the dots to what was happening and what potential solutions or mitigating procedures could look like.  

The Maim article on the other hand gave a very different perspective on environment and history. To me, it focused a lot on how we play the historical ’blame game’ when weighing responsibility in terms of the current climate crisis. In particular, he made an interesting argument regarding how colonialism ties into climate and environment and how this entanglement has caused conflict when considering which countries should bear more of the burden in solving the perils of climate change. In a way, it reminded me a lot of readings I had done on famines in India and to what extent the British empire can be blamed for their disastrous effects (Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts is a great book to check out for this). Is it fair to expect countries like India, who were only dragged into becoming coal dependent societies by British imperialism, to listen to the very same people who now tell them to turn to renewable resources? Is it fair for Western countries to ask developing countries to stop using fossil fuels to industrialise, when they have had years more to exploit these sources for their benefit, even if we now know better? It’s certainly a challenging conundrum – indeed though climate seems to be a transnational connector, it is also capable of dividing us, particularly when development and modernity are at stake.  

I find this week’s topic and readings extremely interesting because of the questions it raises about the practice of doing history and what counts as history. While I had heard of environmental history, and fondly remember reading (I think) some of the works listed in Andreas Malm’s 2017 blogpost ‘Who lit this fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy’ such as Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century on the Little Ice Age in MO1008, I was unaware of how extensive the field of non-human history is. I do remember the tone that Malm critiques this work for in how this study of the Little Ice Age makes the climate change we face today seem normal, almost inevitable. This blog post is careful to specify that there is nothing accidental about the current climate change situation and that it is instead the fault of humans in the last two centuries. I was fascinated to learn how empire contributed to this climate crisis, specifically the British Empire in India or the Soviet Union. 

In Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor’s ‘‘More-Than-Human Histories’ from 2020, I was first struck by the number of terms they employ: more-than-human approach, environmental humanities, multispecies studies, co-constitution. Additionally, there is such a diversity of fields that connect to more-than-human histories as the article talks about academics that classify themselves as ecofeminists, multispecies ethnography, Marxist geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists. This terminology and the focus on seeing all environments as cultural and natural hybrids, overcoming the privileging of some worlds and lives over others, and ridding of conceptual divisions of human life versus other life forms made me think about how absurd this article might sound to a traditional eighty-year-old national historian. Maybe it’s just me, but I am always happy to read articles that make me feel like I haven’t thought about things enough. I am glad we are exposed to such a breadth of ideas about the future of history as I think it’s important for us as students to understand that there is always space for more evolution of historical thought. 

In both articles, I was not surprised by the immense pressure put on historians to explain the past in a way that positively influences the future. I feel like this is a common thread in histories that focus on phenomena that hurt people or other things. In Malm’s, he specifically writes that in a warming world the central task of climate historians is to study history-in-climate rather than climate-in-history as this can lead to exit strategies and solutions. Similarly, O’Gorman and Gaynor’s article gives an example of the power of using non-traditional historical sources in the evaluation of the non-human: “historians might also use sources like whale ear wax, which registers signs of stress like whaling and climate change, to reconsider these histories from the perspective of the whales while also attending to changing scientific interests and questions” (727). By demonstrating the detrimental histories of something like whaling from this non-human perspective, she argues that this could change the future ethical engagement of humans with non-human worlds. Overall, I really enjoyed the reading from this week and how it forced me to expand my definition of “history.”  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indian suffragettes : female identities and transnational networks, Sumita Mukherjee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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