The interest in transnational history has grown rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s, and there is now a significant literature discussing what it is, why we need it, and how to do it. One major source of this enthusiasm has been from historians of the United States. Ian Tyrrell, one such scholar working in Australia, is an early and persistent advocate of transnational approaches. His target in ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’ (1991) was a form of American history writing which focused on the idea of the United States as ‘“outside” the normal patterns and laws of history’, and especially as different from Europe.^[5] Despite an interest in relating the United States to the rest of the world and a strong tradition in comparative history, he argues, historians of the United States failed to ‘transcend the boundaries of nationalist historiography’. As an alternative, he suggested that ‘the possibilities of a transnational history must be considered’.^[6] Instead of assuming American exceptionalism, historians could ask why it has been such a focus for historians of the United States, and by way of contrast depict United States history ‘as a variation on transnational themes’. He pointed out that there was another American historical tradition that offered an alternative to nationalist exceptionalism, one which saw the United States as a prime site for cosmopolitan exchange. Key advocates of American cosmopolitanism had included feminist Jane Addams in her Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) and Randolph Bourne in his neglected essay, ‘Trans-National America’ (1916), whose importance is noted by Desley Deacon in this volume, where she explores the the hopes that the new American film industry in the 1920s and 1930s would become a major source of ‘world acquaintanceship’. Tyrrell also noted other forms of transnational history: regional approaches on the model of the French Annales school, and global and world history informed by world systems theory and other approaches to conceptualising world history as a whole. Histories of the environment and of international movements and organisations were also subjects that clearly required the transcending of national boundaries.^[7]

The term ‘transnational’ caught on, and enthusiasm for it grew quickly in the United States. In a special issue of the Journal of American History on transnational history the following year, David Thelen suggested that a transnational approach could ‘enrich historical understanding by providing other pasts and presents to compare with the American past and present’.^[8] Eight years after the appearance of his original article, Tyrrell developed his earlier argument further. He now demonstrated in greater detail that the national history he was criticising had become dominant in the United States only during and after World War I; before then, a transnational approach had coexisted with nation-centred professional history, and indeed had flourished. In particular, he noted, a broad transnational approach had been taken by women’s historians such as Jane Addams and African American historians such as W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James.^[9]

The latter point was expanded upon in the same issue of the Journal of American History by Robin Kelley, who argued that Black history in the United States had always been transnational. Early black historians had had a diasporic sensibility, shaped by their antiracist and anti-imperialist politics; they had consistently opposed the racist assumptions of their white counterparts, who constituted the mainstream historical profession in America, but in turn found their work generally dismissed by that profession as ideological rather than truly historical. In the Cold War context, black intellectuals had intensified their internationalism. In contrast to other kinds of history, Kelley argued, the transnationalism of African American intellectuals was born not in the academy but in ‘social movements for freedom, justice, and self-determination’.^[10]

During the 1990s, an interest in transnational history also came from quite another quarter – the revived interest in British imperial history. Although critical of the cultural emphasis of the new imperial history, A. G. Hopkins was important in calling for a reintegration of national postcolonial histories into a broader imperial framework. In the world of historiography, the response to decolonisation in the 1960s and after had been the separate development in each postcolonial nation of a professional, academic, national history. It was time, Hopkins argued in 1999, to bring these postcolonial histories back into conversation with one another and with Britain, this time, ‘without deference’.^[11] Furthermore, as historians like Catherine Hall and Antoinette Burton pointed out, renewed attention to histories of imperialism considered not only the impact of ‘Europe’ on its colonial possessions, but also the impact of imperialism on metropolitan societies. Imperial powers not only had dramatic impact on the lives of the peoples they colonised, but were also themselves in important ways constituted by the colonising experience. As Burton put it, scholars like Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and others had provoked ‘a critical return to the connections between metropole and colony, race and nation’.^[12]

Both the American and the British enthusiasm for new kinds of transnational history were consonant with a growing focus on comparative histories of white settler societies, those forms of colonial society which had displaced indigenous peoples from their land. This was a form of colonialism distinguished from others by its relative lack of interest in ‘native’ labour, and hence very often, in keeping the ‘native’ alive at all. Most of the European colonial empires included settler colonies; in the English-speaking world, the modern societies sharing this history include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and in a limited sense, South Africa. There was a revived interest in comparing the histories of these societies in the 1990s; Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis’s edited collection, Unsettling Settler Societies (1995), was important in re-popularising the term.^[13] Historians began once again to develop expertise in the history of more than one settler society: Alan Lester and Elizabeth Elbourne, for example, have demonstrated how settler societies were interconnected in the nineteenth century as a result of British imperial policy, especially on matters of Aboriginal policy and settler practice.^[14] Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips, and Shurlee Swain have provided a detailed comparison of the political rights and statuses of Indigenous peoples in settler societies of the British Empire: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.^[15] There has been a substantial contribution to this scholarship by Australian feminist historians such as Anne Keary, Kat Ellinghaus, and Ann McGrath, all of whom have compared aspects of Indigenous people’s histories in Australia and the United States.^[16]

American historians of the United States have been much less likely to include their country in this category than Australian or Canadian or New Zealand historians do, partly because the history of African slavery complicates and to some degree obscures the history of Native American displacement and erasure and partly because their achievement of political independence through revolution is seen to mark a sharp break from their history as a settler colony. Ian Tyrrell is among those who have argued strongly that the United States should be included in this analytical framework. Reorienting American history to transnational themes would be incomplete, he observed in 2002, if the focus remained on connections with Europe. Comparisons between the United States and the other British settler societies, he pointed out, were taken for granted by nineteenth century commentators such as Froude, Trollope, Dilke, Jebb, Seeley, and Bryce, but had fallen out of favour with the rise of nationalism during and after World War I. It was time, he suggested, for historical analysis to return to these connections.^[17]