Table of Contents
For some years, historians have been pointing to the significance and implications of history’s complicity with the nation state. History as a professional discipline was constituted to serve the business of nation building, and has accordingly very often seen its task as providing an account of national experience, values and traditions, thus helping forge a national community. The question historians are now asking is: has history as handmaiden to the nation state distorted or limited our understanding of the past? And if so, can a transnational approach help develop new and more adequate forms of historical writing?[1]
This collection of essays addresses these questions and also seeks to demonstrate in practice what transnational history looks like. It investigates with an enthusiastic, if critical eye the potential of transnational approaches to develop new understandings of the past by highlighting historical processes and relationships that transcend nation states and that connect apparently separate worlds. Our aim is both theoretical, for instance considering the claims of ‘postcolonial’, ‘regional’, or ‘world history’ approaches to illuminate historical analysis, and practical, presenting historical case studies that demonstrate how transnational approaches can produce new and exciting forms of historical knowledge. We particularly focus on ways in which expertise in ‘Australian history’ can contribute to and benefit from transnational histories, though a number of important essays in this collection do not touch on Australia at all.
So, what is transnational history? We can define it in a number of ways, but put simply, it is the study of the ways in which past lives and events have been shaped by processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of nation states. Transnational history seeks to understand ideas, things, people, and practices which have crossed national boundaries. It is generally in a complex relation with national history; it may seek to interrogate, situate, supersede, displace, or avoid it altogether. In their reaction against what they see as rigid and confining national histories, many of those enthusiastic about transnational history reach for metaphors of fluidity, as in talk of circulation and flows (of people, discourses , and commodities), alongside metaphors of connection and relationship.
How does transnational history differ, if at all, from other kinds of history which also transcend national boundaries: world, regional, and comparative history? World history seeks to understand the world as a whole; at its best, as Tony Ballantyne puts it in his chapter in this collection, it ‘pays close attention to “bundles of relationships” … and is sensitive to the complex interplays between different layers of the analysis: the local, the regional, the inter-regional, the national, the continental, and the global’.[2] Regional histories, sometimes organised around oceanic formations – the Pacific Rim or the Atlantic World, whose historiography is discussed in this collection by Michael McDonnell – also insist on the necessity of locating nations in larger economic and political networks. Comparative history is a form of history which crosses national borders by taking two or more societies (cities, regions, nations) and comparing aspects of their history. Such approaches are valuable but they very often keep the idea of the nation both central and intact. Comparative histories are also notoriously difficult to execute well, so large is the sheer quantity of scholarship that is normally required, and so hard is it to translate the conceptual framework developed by and for one national or regional history into that of another.
Transnational histories, then, can take many forms. They may be studies of international organisations, taking as their subjects already constituted bodies such as the Pan-African Congress or the League of Nations, and charting their historical development. Or they may be individual biographies, as exemplified in a forthcoming collection called Colonial Lives across the British Empire.[3] Transnational biographies are represented in this volume in Emma Christopher’s account of transported convict, Thomas Limpus; Desley Deacon’s discussion of film-maker, Walter Wanger; and Jill Matthews’s evocation of the varied career of film entrepreneur, J. D. Williams. Other forms of transnational history include imperial histories, and histories of land and maritime exploration, ideas, political movements, migration, voyaging, and environments.[4]
Transnational history has, then, many departure points and follows many lines of enquiry. Whatever form it takes, transnational history suggests that historical understanding often requires us to move beyond a national framework of analysis, to explore connections between peoples, societies and events usually thought of as distinct and separate.