American Historical Review Conversation on Transnational History

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by C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed

Transnational History is no longer new, but it is the latest incarnation of an approach that has been characterized as comparative, international, world, and global history. All want to break out of the nation-state or singular states as a category of analysis and eschew the ethnocentrism that characterizes the writing of history. It is the product of the time, as world history a reaction against ethnocentrism and global history seems to give purpose and process to globalization, just as transnational history for Europeans seems much more meaning to a sense of movement and interpretation for diaspora studies and what not.

Transnational history implies a comparison between the contemporary movement of groups, goods, technology, or people across national borders and the transit of similar or related objects in another time. It allows for examinations of migratory patterns under a common rubric. The key claim to any transnational approach is its central concern with movements, flows, and circulation, not simply as a theme or motif, but as an analytic set of methods which defines the endeavor itself. Historical movements are not only made in different places, but they are constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions.

Transnational history part of a larger critique of the West and its culture. For the feminist, transnationalism allows one to examine how processes and institutions such as colonization, modernization, and feminist movements have sustained critical divisions that have differently privileged or harmed groups through gender, racial, or sexual frameworks. What constitutes the object of historical inquiry once you challenge the stability of the border to define the nation?

Many histories are projects aiming to reconstruct aspects of the human past that transcend any one nation-state, empire, or other politically defined territory. It can be global in scope, but also particular regional histories. How do historians keep an audience if they move away from national histories and why are so many pages devoted to finding a need for the methodology of transnational history in lieu of empirical research. It should avoid the post-colonial self-referentialism to the point of irrelevance. Transnationalism means little or nothing for most of world history, yet it is becoming indispensible to describe crucial trends in more recent times.

One must remember that nations are not to be transcended in the forces under discussion: they are the products, often the rather late products, of those processes. How does one model change over time for a readership of any level of sophistication? Diachronic concerns of historians are not so easily swept aside by privileging one cause over another, whether it the economy, state, or ideology.

On the one hand these comments illuminate the high aspirations of transnational history and reveal a sophisticated awareness of what is at stake, both practically and theoretically. There is also an implicit critique of teaching methdology, political engagement, and presentism that reveal a frustration with the recent preoccupations with theory and esoteric style of discourse among acacdemia.

It is difficult to track the movement of objects, people, ideas, and texts using the sources available. There is a grand narrative of domination and resistance in transnational history: imperialist reciveving a much more nuanced treatment than victim. Too often globalization and transnationalism are seen in a binary models where globalization as a powerful and oppressive force that compels marginalized groups to sustain cultures of resistence. The most effective transnational historical studies are those that examine how cultural practices and ideologies shape, constrain, or enable the economic, social, and political conditions in which people and goods circulate within local, regional, and global locales.

Cultrual studies sometimes have an effect of reifying culture or cultures in such a way as to makr them seem authentic and real as against the inauthenticity of Western rationalism. Economy transforms culture. For all the contributions of subaltern studies and cultural anthropolgy, it is still too easy to slip back into the habit of imagining global forces as transcending nations and not creating them. Working across conventinoal categories will make it more tempting to be satisfied with exploring representation and idenity, rather than actually explaining why wealth and war occur. Transnational studies with cultural fields need a firmer empircal and comparative background. Studying investment patterns, elite networks and institutions will make transnational history more vibrant than a narrow focus on ideology and ideas.

How does a transnational approach differ from other approaches like modernization theory, Marxism, dependency theory, socio-historical treatments of state-making, and the like: should transnationalism yield a new narrative on development or have something specific to tell us about the issue of modernity?

The process of colonialization should show interacting agents from both backgrounds. Ideas of modernization, development, and now globalization have provoked historians to provide better ways to explain how we got to where we are today: a world in which people continue to struggle over the meaning of modernity, development can take many different routes and the institution of state sovereignty is more contested and assertive. Old development models focus too closely on how the state caused all the change: it increases the number of external transnational actoes and multiplies the nature of the internal groups tied to transnational formations. Transnational forces also show how modernity is more than a Western process of progress and enlightenment and reveal modernity to be a multifaceted process whereby political, economic, and cultural exchanges appear in varied and often unpredictable ways. Dependency narrative at its core is about how the relations of various parts of the world to each other: the global spread of capitalism is important to Marxism, modernization theory postulates the possibility of the global spread of modernity as the product of interaction of various states with one another.

A new narrative seems to focus on now at the end of the nineteenth century away from how Europeans felt change but on the movement of capital, goods, people, and ideas. Writing a narrative forces us to explain change and identify who is driving it. The interconnectedness of history is a starting point, but pays attention to networks, processes, beleifs, and instituions that trranscend politically defined spaces. Transnationalism must focus on building an idea on why the world became more eocnomically, socially, poltically, and culturally connected in the past 500 years. Capitalism and state formation remain the two master processes of the modern era.

Directions in transnational history:

Diasporas are a worthwhile way of approaching transnational history, provided these studies grappple closely with the reception and domestication of such people and modes of life in the host society. Look at how Western ideas were transformed rather than deepened or generalized in the third world. A transnational lens will yield insights on many issues. Continuities and changes in communication technology.