At the conclusion of today\u2019s Unconference, after successive rounds of collaborative writing, group discussions, and an extremely valuable debate over the superior chocolate in a box of Celebrations (the revisionist position: the Bounty has been widely and quite wrongly neglected in recent scholarship), I find myself feeling unusually optimistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Less than a week away from the\nnext deadline, not only do I now feel confident in our ability to crack some of\nthe methodological conundrums that we will be discussing in our essays, but I find\nI am genuinely excited by the direction of some of our conversations regarding the\nfield of transnational history more broadly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within my first group, the conversation\nwas largely to do with our shared interest in the scope for transnational\nhistory prior to the late modern era, loosely defined. To indulge in the spirit\nthe day and to free ourselves from the tyranny of multiples of ten, let\u2019s call\nit the period before 1853. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It appeared very quickly that we shared several ideas amounting essentially to the validity of studying transnational history during this earlier timeframe. These included but were not limited to the idea that, although it was not necessarily a dominant aspect of either personal identity or interpersonal relations, there was at least some kind of national consciousness emerging in European societies during this period, though it will have been conceived and expressed differently at different times and in different spatial or cultural contexts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet again, this led me to\nthinking\u2014 and, forcibly but effectively, to writing \u2014about the need for a closer\nexamination of these emerging solidarities using a transnational lens, an issue\nwith which I have already had a brief encounter in the research and planning of\nmy project proposal. Like Nicholas, I think a lot of my ideas here were\ninspired by the work of Alison Games, who effectively lights a bonfire under\nthe assumption that early English encounters with distant peoples were dominated\nby the rationale of different nations or of nationality. However, there is also\nno doubt in the title of her work that these were English <\/em>cosmopolitans, however mild or adaptable their connection\nto their place of origin might have been. And the fact that the nation did not\nappear to be especially dominant in these exchanges arguably makes it even more\ninteresting when expressions of national identity or the national character of their\nmission or group do emerge at this time and at these sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This leads me nicely onto the\nsubject which I hope to explore in greater detail in my first essay: namely,\nthe construction of space in transnational history. By this, I mean that I want\nto interrogate the replacement of earlier \u2018national\u2019 (and perhaps\ninternational) frameworks with an emphatically \u2018transnational\u2019 framework which\nI believe exhibits a number of comparable weaknesses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Defining his own approach to\ntransnational history in 2008, Erik van der Vleuten lamented that \u2018the national\nhistories of the nineteenth century naturalised the nation as the most\nsignificant form of human solidarity,\u2019 and, in a move that perhaps encapsulates\nthe mood of the transnational movement, he goes on to ask whether history can\nunmake what it did so much to make in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, I do wonder whether, so\nfar, we have been so preoccupied with un<\/em>making\nthese old assumptions, often focusing on anything but <\/em>the nation in our attempts to usurp its former dominance, we\nhave forgotten the importance of re<\/em>making\nits history from a new perspective. For in their quest to document more\nattractive objects of study in the form of transnational lives, spaces, and\nobjects, transnational historians have neglected to re-examine the nation as a\nhistorical artefact with a transnational history of its own. And, more\nconcerningly, they have often struggled to reconcile the somewhat limiting scope\nof \u2018transnational<\/em>\u2019 history with a\ncomplex world of connections and migrations not only between the more unitary\nor, at least, artificially unified entities we would consider nations, but\nbetween spaces better understood as composites, borderlands, connected regions,\nor localities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not twenty-four hours ago, these problems would have been frankly terrifying. But today has been a day for challenges, and if our Unconference was any indication, I sense that we are beginning to move from our frantic unmaking of definitions in Week 2 to a gradual but determined remaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a Transnational History of Technology: Meanings, Promises, Pitfalls’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 974-994. (Quoted from p.982 – thanks to Nick for tracking this down, it’s a brilliant summary, and a very common take on the transnational agenda.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the conclusion of today\u2019s Unconference, after successive rounds of collaborative writing, group discussions, and an extremely valuable debate over the superior chocolate in a box of Celebrations (the revisionist position: the Bounty has been widely and quite wrongly neglected<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-l6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308","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=1308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1311,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1308\/revisions\/1311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}