I has only been three weeks and three sessions with and around transnational and global history – thus far. Today we plunged into the wide Indian Ocean (with Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons). There is one more week to go
Dear Granny, greeting from transnational land…..
Confession up front: I am an analogue boy, i.e. growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. And I do remember sending postcards. How exciting was that. Travelling to a new place, an unknown place, then – out of sense of
Globalisation: a result of Nationalism? Or vice versa?
Definitions are tough. ‘Transnational’, ‘Global’, ‘Shared’, ‘Comparative’… the list goes on. However, Sebastian Conrad’s book Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany has enlightened me on the differences between these terms. More than that, this book, particularly its introduction, has
Project Update: Structuring Communities
This is just a sort of project update post, so please bear with me as I get all kinds of specific. While I have been able to find ample sources for the nature of Regla de Ochá (RdO) itself, I
Some thoughts on ‘Transnational Movements’
The reading this week has focused on actors and networks. This is particularly interesting for my project as my starting point was the role of African independence leaders as transnational actors and the network of political figures that they were
Why my project is worthwhile and transnational.
This piece is a blend of what I wrote during pair writing at the unconference and my proposal. Sex is part of the human experience and so is as close to universal as possible, this means that anything connected to
Hiccups in My Project Proposal
I’ve been doing research into my potential project, and I’ve been encountering quite a few issues which I am anxious to address. If anyone has any advice for me on how to proceed, I would be exceedingly grateful. I am
Comparative History (chicken?) – Transnational History (egg?)
It was great to see some of you browsing through last year’s posts, comments, readings – that is precisely the purpose of running “the soul” of MO3351 on this site. Keep going, browsing, interacting with previous students’ thoughts. Now, this week
Some Clarity (finally!) with My Project
After my research frustrations, I decided to turn back to David Goldblatt’s comprehensive book about the global history of football, The Ball is Round. In his chapter on the turn of the professionalization of the game, he argues that the European game
Project Proposal- The international Ghadarite network: The role of violence in the development of a transnational organisation
On March 18th 1915, Sir Reginald Craddock delivered a speech to the Imperial Legislative Council addressing the “rapidly developing disturbances of the past few weeks”. He explicitly cited the Ghadar party: “a party of anarchists and revolutionaries, who have been
Unconference Aftermath: Globalization and Sport
After an intellectually rigorous but stimulating day at the Unconference today, my ears are ringing with some fantastic ideas from my fellow students. Everything from ’the scourge of sectarianism’ to ‘hosing whisky’ was mentioned today, and I eagerly anticipate hearing the presentations
Globalisation Revisited – 21st Century Millennialism?
The accepted narrative of globalisation places it as a phenomenon born out of post-Cold War American capitalism; a creation of the late twentieth century manifested in the inescapable homogenising successes of McDonalds, Apple and liberal democracy. However, as Conrad, Tyrell
The transnational histories of nations
The reaction against the ‘nation-state’ paradigm as the inevitable status quo has become well entrenched in recent historical discourse. Gellner’s and Anderson’s seminal works in the 1980s have spawned a plethora of re-evaluations of how we can conceptualise the world.
Preserving Clarity in Transnational History
If transnational history is intended to ‘destroy containers’, to borrow the phrasing of Dr Struck, then we must be careful to ensure that we are not simply replacing one set of obstructive and dogmatic terms with a newer yet similarly
Is transnational history dependent on the nation?
Transnational history is an elusive term. It’s perhaps an attractive concept because of the difficulty in citing an exact definition, but its potential and creativity is crucial to its interpretation. Freed from the constrictions of an “intellectual straitjacket”, I am