It is often cited that there is a danger that \u2018Transnational history\u2019 could become a buzzword for a new type of international history: a means simply to transcend previous \u2018boxes\u2019, such as the nation, region, or locale, and a means by which historians can escape the confines of Cold War barriers of area studies. Active, collaborative engagement with the term is necessary across the academy and with a broader reading public to understand how different \u2018ways of seeing\u2019 can be integrated into all of our research.<\/p>\n
History as an academic discipline grew up alongside the nation-state, becoming one of its principal ideological pillars. This way of practising history was (and still is) warmly received by a wider general audience who want to clearly understand where they have come from, what their ancestors did, and how they have come to be where they are. A typical national history fed to the general public offers this with a linear trajectory of cause and effect, neglecting the \u201cspace of the flows\u201d and the historical processes constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions.<\/p>\n
As much as enhancing our understanding of the past, there is a duty to the general public to provide them with a better framework with which to understand what has gone before. Perhaps the strength of Transnational history can be in its refusal to pander to what we believe have become \u2018popular\u2019 tastes. With the centenary of the outbreak of the \u2018First World War\u2019 last year, for example, there was a deluge of books claiming to explain the outbreak of the War. I cannot recall seeing one that actually attempted to deconstruct the notion of a \u2018World War\u2019, whose primary theatre of operations was in a Europe that, in typical fin-de-si\u00e8cle <\/em>fashion, <\/em>duped itself into thinking it was the centre of the world. Rather than getting bogged down in \u2018inevitablist\u2019 vs. \u2018accidentalist\u2019 debates, is the answer to experiment with new chronologies of flows, connections and exchanges, which amount to a different lens?<\/p>\n But this here is the real challenge as laid out by Jan\u00a0R\u00fcger: how can the transnational perspective be reconnected with the more traditional questions which are still at the heart of our understanding of modern Europe? For sure, there is increasing access to national archives, but, Matthew Connelly perceives research issues with regards to the underdeveloped history of international and transnational histories: how can we tackle these issues when we lack archive based evidence of United Nations agencies, for instance, and some of the most private foundations?<\/p>\n Transnational history is a product of our place in history. Express communications means that many of us transcend traditional \u2018containers\u2019. Nobody is certain what form this history will take. Collaboration, communication, and interaction appear to be the key, with a suitably careful use of language and semantics as we display our research to both an academic and more general audience.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Readings: Christopher A. Bayly et al., \u2018AHR Conversation: On Transnational History\u2019; Clavin, Patricia, \u2018Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts\u2019; Pomeranz, Kenneth. \u201cSocial History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change.\u201d; R\u00fcger, Jan, \u2018OXO: Or, the Challenges of Transnational History\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is often cited that there is a danger that \u2018Transnational history\u2019 could become a buzzword for a new type of international history: a means simply to transcend previous \u2018boxes\u2019, such as the nation, region, or locale, and a means<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14,13],"tags":[16,17,18,15,6],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion","category-readings","tag-bayly","tag-cold-war","tag-first-world-war","tag-ruger","tag-transnational-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-1B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","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=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}