The reaction against the \u2018nation-state\u2019 paradigm as the inevitable status quo has become well entrenched in recent historical discourse. Gellner\u2019s and Anderson\u2019s seminal works in the 1980s have spawned a plethora of re-evaluations of how we can conceptualise the world. Patrick Geary\u2019s Myth of Nations<\/i> examines a handful of \u2018foundation\u2019 myths, showing how they can be easily deconstructed to demonstrate holes in the teleological \u2018nation-building\u2019 charade which so many governments throughout the world continue to propagate. Too many of these narratives are inward looking, painting a rich tapestry of the ingenuity of the \u2018people\u2019 of a geographically confined area on the path to full nationhood. The categories of chance and interaction with external powers are almost entirely whitewashed out to produce an epic tale of nations emerging in isolated processes.<\/p>\n
As historians, we are instantly aware that these creations are anachronistic, and the deconstruction of such myths is closely tied to the discipline itself. We are immediately sceptical of events and movements that purport to take place in a vacuum, so is it in fact the case that transnational and global history (at least in twenty-first century scholarship) has already become subconsciously subsumed into the practice of history?<\/p>\n
The nation is not the only historical \u2018actor\u2019. Sebastian Conrad has shown how nationalisation and globalisation are not \u201ctwo stages of a consecutive process of development, but rather were dependent on each other.\u201d It is only through cross-border interaction that the identity of the nation became constructed. Catherine Hall states: \u201cWe can understand the nation only by defining what is not part of it.\u201d By this token, all nations were created transnationally. In the United States, for example, links were not one-way, but were very much reciprocal; people, ideas, and institutions moved back and forth. The trend for \u2018Atlantic History\u2019 departments in North American universities reflects this rethinking; however, relations with the \u2018Atlantic World\u2019 were arguably just as important as relations with the \u2018Pacific World\u2019, but this is often left out of the picture of \u2018Atlantic histories\u2019. The value of transnational and global history perspectives is that they take into consideration all<\/i> of these connections. How, then, should a transnational<\/i> history of a nation be constructed?<\/p>\n
Of course, it would be unrealistic to suggest that a single volume could claim to be a definitive \u2018transnational history\u2019 of that nation under study. We should, rather, speak of \u2018transnational histories\u2019- the plural form implying that each constituent study contributes to the corpus of the transnational history of that particular nation. Perhaps this is too broad a canvas, but it remains necessarily so if one is to incorporate all the flows and connections, taking everything into account. Eventually, one finds that \u2018globalisation\u2019 grew in tandem with \u2018nationalisation\u2019. In Germany, for example, the debates around 1900 centring on Chinese labour, Conrad shows, \u201cmust be seen as a reaction to the increasing mobility and connectedness of the era.\u201d \u00a0In rhetoric about protecting national identity and character, the degree of racial difference between the \u2018Germans\u2019 and \u2018Chinese\u2019 was perceived to be so extreme that there was no risk of the \u2018German\u2019 race becoming diluted. This was part of the justification by the Prussian landowners in their support for the prospective importation of such labour, rather than \u2018Polish\u2019 labour, where the risk of miscegenation was considered to be far higher. It is no coincidence that the foreign ministries of burgeoning \u2018nation-states\u2019 became the most important governmental departments at this time; local and national problems were embedded within global structures<\/p>\n
Naturally, all of these labels- \u2018Chinese\u2019, \u2018Americans\u2019, \u2018Germans\u2019, and \u2018Poles\u2019- are constructs themselves. It was only through the \u2018discovery\u2019 of the \u2018Other\u2019 that such identities could be created. As historians, we know that the world cannot be analysed in these black-and-white terms. Levels of identity are, and always have been, far more multilayered than this. Transnational history ensures this dialogue continues.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n Conrad, S. Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany <\/i>(Cambridge; New York: 2010)<\/p>\n Tyrrell, I. Transnational Nation, United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 <\/i>(Basingstoke: 2007)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The reaction against the \u2018nation-state\u2019 paradigm as the inevitable status quo has become well entrenched in recent historical discourse. Gellner\u2019s and Anderson\u2019s seminal works in the 1980s have spawned a plethora of re-evaluations of how we can conceptualise the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,13],"tags":[50,52,47,27,54,28,6],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-readings","tag-china","tag-conrad","tag-germany","tag-global-history","tag-local","tag-transnational","tag-transnational-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-24","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}