{"id":2949,"date":"2026-02-16T21:48:41","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T21:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=2949"},"modified":"2026-02-16T21:48:42","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T21:48:42","slug":"week-4-blog-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2026\/02\/16\/week-4-blog-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 4 Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Adelman\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Is&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;still possible, or has it had its moment?<\/em>, Green\u2019s&nbsp;<em>The Trials of Transnationalism<\/em>, and the EUI collective text&nbsp;<em>For a Fair(er)&nbsp;Global History<\/em>&nbsp;all grapple with the question of whether global and transnational history can survive the apparent unravelling of the liberal order that once seemed to make them possible.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Adelman\u2019s piece&nbsp;was written during a period of great crisis for&nbsp;globalisation,&nbsp;financial meltdown,&nbsp;retreating integration,&nbsp;and the return of&nbsp;ethnonationalism,&nbsp;it asks whether&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;was too closely tied to&nbsp;flash-in-the-pan optimism about&nbsp;globalising&nbsp;victories in the 80s and 90s.&nbsp;Adelman points&nbsp;at&nbsp;2006 as the&nbsp;period when scholars \u2018jumped\u2019 on the&nbsp;new&nbsp;globalising&nbsp;world dreamed of and spearheaded by economists and politicians,&nbsp;a scant few years before&nbsp;it began to collapse.&nbsp;Reactionary political movements both Western and \u2018Restern\u2019 arose against this Globalism, and the \u2018provincial\u2019 elements of the West began to&nbsp;radicalise&nbsp;against the&nbsp;liberal cosmopolitanism that was being built, one that, to them,&nbsp;marginalised&nbsp;or even abandoned them entirely.&nbsp;But,&nbsp;he does not call for&nbsp;an&nbsp;abandonment of&nbsp;global frames; instead, he urges global historians to take&nbsp;these concerns more&nbsp;seriously, to engage with them and attempt to convince them, rather than accelerate ahead without them.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Green, by contrast,&nbsp;focuses&nbsp;overwhelmingly on transnationalism. She shows how the term&nbsp;grew&nbsp;and&nbsp;proliferated&nbsp;from a term used by an American politician in&nbsp;defence&nbsp;of immigrants,&nbsp;to a&nbsp;necessary&nbsp;weapon&nbsp;against&nbsp;\u2018methodological nationalism\u2019,&nbsp;a&nbsp;label for&nbsp;the cross-border nature of migration,&nbsp;and&nbsp;something&nbsp;near-synonymous&nbsp;with&nbsp;globalisation&nbsp;itself.&nbsp;This exact flexibility, she insists,&nbsp;ensures&nbsp;transnational history is not&nbsp;an&nbsp;\u2018easy\u2019&nbsp;discipline,&nbsp;it demands&nbsp;a&nbsp;careful&nbsp;specification&nbsp;of scale,&nbsp;angles of analysis,&nbsp;and&nbsp;the connections of existing historical actors.&nbsp;She provides a more grounded, though perhaps at the expense of limiting&nbsp;its&nbsp;reach, use of the concept, in contrast to overly&nbsp;ambitious attempts to make&nbsp;<em>everything<\/em>&nbsp;\u2018transnational\u2019,&nbsp;and&nbsp;reactionary attempts to discard it entirely.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, the EUI seminar text&nbsp;goes further&nbsp;than either Green or Adelman&nbsp;in terms of&nbsp;philosophising&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;by arguing that it must take on a \u2018fair(er)\u2019 form. Writing&nbsp;during COVID, the&nbsp;collective authors&nbsp;provide a reflection&nbsp;on&nbsp;the impact that&nbsp;studying&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;from Zoom boxes and&nbsp;the hardest closed borders the world had experienced in many years&nbsp;had on both&nbsp;themselves&nbsp;and their understanding of it as a concept.&nbsp;The&nbsp;programme&nbsp;makes little attempt to provide a unique&nbsp;definition for&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;as a&nbsp;practice, and&nbsp;instead puts forth an argument in&nbsp;favour&nbsp;of re-balancing its focus.&nbsp;It argues&nbsp;that attempts to combat Eurocentrism have only resulted in \u2018Eurasian centrism\u2019,&nbsp;that further&nbsp;diversification in&nbsp;terms of&nbsp;references,&nbsp;power&nbsp;relations, and collaboration&nbsp;are necessary to provide a better, fairer, method of analysis.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Altogether, the texts&nbsp;argue that&nbsp;global&nbsp;and&nbsp;transnational history have not \u2018had&nbsp;their&nbsp;moment\u2019,&nbsp;but&nbsp;that these&nbsp;disciplines must&nbsp;adapt&nbsp;to the times, to critically engage with&nbsp;their&nbsp;outside detractors, and to reform its internal elements that&nbsp;are in need of&nbsp;reform.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adelman\u2019s&nbsp;Is&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;still possible, or has it had its moment?, Green\u2019s&nbsp;The Trials of Transnationalism, and the EUI collective text&nbsp;For a Fair(er)&nbsp;Global History&nbsp;all grapple with the question of whether global and transnational history can survive the apparent unravelling of the liberal order<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"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":true,"_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-2949","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-Lz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2949","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\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2949"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2951,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2949\/revisions\/2951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}