{"id":800,"date":"2018-02-14T12:45:48","date_gmt":"2018-02-14T12:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/?p=800"},"modified":"2018-02-19T12:27:55","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T12:27:55","slug":"the-instance-of-the-abstract-when-accuracy-is-inconvenient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/2018\/02\/14\/the-instance-of-the-abstract-when-accuracy-is-inconvenient\/","title":{"rendered":"The instance of the abstract: when accuracy is inconvenient"},"content":{"rendered":"

How accurate does history need to be in order to be valid? How accurate can it be? In the face of the concept of transnational <\/em>history, and the implications that some of its wider-reaching premises bring to bear upon much of the rest of conventional history, these are two of the questions currently foremost in my mind.<\/p>\n

Transnational history is ultimately an attempt to study flow: to look at the ways in which boxes previously deemed discrete are in fact contiguous, and to examine how what was previously thought to be contained within <\/em>those boxes in fact sprawls and ebbs across <\/em>and between<\/em> those boxes. The issue is, of course, that what flows between<\/em> does not exist solely in those liminal, hard-to-define spaces. Transnational history is not merely a study of borders. Such a study would produce a narrative of deep inaccuracy.<\/p>\n

That which moves across borders starts moving while it is still within them. That\u2019s the difficulty presented by this concept of flow. It\u2019s accurate, so far as I can see; it\u2019s also phenomenally difficult to actually write about<\/em>. Transnational history conceptualises the past as a vast web of interrelated networks of constant movement on a scale both intra- and inter-national.<\/p>\n

These networks are anthropological in nature. They are composed, as has already been observed, of actors. All actors form a part of a network<\/em>; and as all networks, especially in the past centuries of increased globalization, are ultimately at the very least quasi-contiguous to a deep degree, that means that all actors could<\/em> be said to be \u2018transnational actors\u2019, whether they move across borders or no. At the very least, their actions, though deemed by conventional history to be of importance perhaps solely as movement within a \u2018class\u2019 or similarly defined conceptual entities, will instead, as part of the great cloud of moving relationships, have transnational implication. Patricia Clavin references this in her mention of the idea of \u2018glo-cal\u2019 history (global\/local).[1]<\/a> Ian Tyrrell, too, recognises this to be the case. \u2018The fates of Americans,\u2019 he observes, was \u2018intertwined with the wider world\u2019.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Those who lived in America \u2013not, for most of 18th<\/sup> century, a nation, let alone a nation-state\u2014 were caught up in a network that undoubtedly contained the British; that was affected by the French and the Spanish; that was affected by the Russian Empire, an alliance with whom could have spared the British the unhappy sight of French ships in Chesapeake Bay; that was impacted by the Caribbean, India, China, and populations and events across the globe. To say other than Tyrrell does in the above quotation would be patently inaccurate.<\/p>\n

But what do <\/em>you say, in that case? Leaving aside \u2018how do you argue\u2019 \u2013how do you amass an understanding of such vast networks and contingencies and present it without creating a conventional, narrow narrative\u2014 how do you phrase<\/em> it? Tyrrell, for my money, isn\u2019t sure, and is inconsistent. His history of America \u2013a \u2018Transnational Nation\u2019\u2014 attempts to look at the interconnectivity formative of his chosen subject, and ranges its gaze across the globe, but nonetheless stumbles. Tyrrell frequently returns \u2013tacitly; implicitly; sometimes inadvertently; sometimes explicitly\u2014 to a lexicon that accepts and adopts the conventional terminology of nation-based history. Take, for example, this sentence: \u2018Badly bruised though the United States was in the military conflict with Britain, the war confirmed American independence\u2019.[3]<\/a> It appears, in fact, on the same page as the previous Tyrrell quotation. Such a statement is easy to read, and easy to write; it\u2019s a convenient shorthand. It\u2019s also simplistic and inaccurate: it makes the nation (or the word assigned to the concept) a metonymy for the networks and flows present within the geographical borders. Such statements are also near-constantly present throughout Tyrrell\u2019s book: \u2018Britain\u2019 is \u2018hurt\u2019 by an economic tariff; an \u2018organic metaphor of breathing in and out\u2019 is posited in a discussion of migration into and out of the United States.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

But who can blame him? How, stylistically, do <\/em>you write a history that is genuinely transnational? It\u2019s a subject to which I expect I shall return. It\u2019s also a subject to which I shall not, I suspect, find any easy answers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>Patricia Clavin, \u201cDefining Transnationalism\u201d, Contemporary European History<\/em>, Vol. 14, No. 4, (Nov., 2005), pp. 421-439, p. 437<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation. United States History in Global Perspective since 1789<\/em> (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007), p. 19<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., pp. 50-51; p. 55<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How accurate does history need to be in order to be valid? How accurate can it be? In the face of the concept of transnational history, and the implications that some of its wider-reaching premises bring to bear upon much<\/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-800","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-cU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800","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=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}