We hope to advance the historiographical debates of the last decade, and to that end the volume begins with three historiographical essays. The first, by Tony Ballantyne, places an examination of C. A. Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004) within the context of a brief and illuminating history of world history. He praises Bayly’s breadth, his attention to the Islamic world and South Asia, his clarity on the connections between race, empire, and violence, but draws attention to his relatively thin treatment of subjectivity and colonial modernity. Michael McDonnell outlines the explosion of interest in the history of the Atlantic world, drawing attention to its continuing Anglo-American centrism and suggesting that, despite recognition of the Black Atlantic, Atlantic history ‘is in danger of becoming a neo-imperial form of history; one dominated by the rise of the British Empire, and the birth of the United States’. In its place he advocates a more genuinely pan-Atlantic approach, comparing and combining studies of North and South America. He warns, though, of the danger that such approaches might become so encompassing and all-embracing that they end up with no audience, no clear narrative, and much confusion. Angela Woollacott concludes this section by defining the characteristics of postcolonial histories, and analysing Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects as a justly celebrated example of postcolonial history at its best. Her work, says Woollacott, ‘stands out for its political commitment to drawing attention to the continuing negative consequences of imperialism and colonialism’. She argues, though, that the book does not take full advantage of postcolonial scholarship, such as that offered by the Subaltern Studies historians; nor does it sufficiently place its study within a broad imperial framework.

The second section explores voyages and migrations to and from Australia in a wide variety of places (Britain, China, the United States, and India) and periods (from the late eighteenth century to the present). Emma Christopher focuses on the larger context of convict transportation to New South Wales, tracing through the experiences of one man, Thomas Limpus, three different but connected voyages – to West Africa, to the slave city of Baltimore (though he mutinied and escaped before the ship arrived), and finally to Botany Bay. John Fitzgerald takes us on a wonderful journey between colonial New South Wales and China, as he explores the early history of the New South Wales branch of the international Hung League, or Chinese Masonic Society, attempting to sort intriguing history from fascinating legend. Margaret Allen contrasts the Australian missionary women who travelled freely to India in the first half of the twentieth century with the experiences of the growing number of middle class Indian travellers who sought to visit Australia. White Australian expectations of mobility are contrasted with the White Australia Policy’s construction of Indians as having no rights to mobility. ‘The mobility of modernity’, she concludes, ‘was reserved for those deemed white’. Finally, Jim Hammerton explores the migration of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, the million British people who came to Australia in the two decades or so after World War II. He points out that many of them regarded their migration, initially at least, as a move ‘simply “from one part of Britain to another”’, and draws attention to the ease of movement the Empire and its aftermath brought to British citizens. Yet along with privilege went many painful personal experiences of migration, and he considers the changing ways in which family relationships were maintained, if weakened, over very long distances.

The mobility of white modernity evoked by Allen and Hammerton is also the theme for the third section, entitled ‘Modernity, Film, and Romance’. Desley Deacon explores Walter Wanger’s idea of film as fostering cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, film as a kind of ‘foreign office’ enabling one culture to understand another. In this spirit Paramount developed nature documentary on the one hand and bright sophisticated New York movies on the other. Jill Matthews traces the career of J. D. Williams, a film entrepreneur who worked in the emerging film industry in three continents. Starting in the United States, he was successful in developing the film industry in Australia, Britain, Canada, and again in the United States. She points out that although parts of this career are known to the national film historians of each country, the career as a whole – and its interconnections – has not been understood previously by any of them. Also focusing on modernity, Hsu-Ming Teo explores the ways in which particular ideas about and practices of romantic love have become increasingly transnational because of the global reach of Anglophone culture and the impact of American advertising and marketing industries. In examining the transformation of Australian understandings of romance, she also points to the gendered time-lag in the embrace of commodified dating culture.

The questions of race introduced in parts one and two reappear in a different form in part four. John Maynard explores the hitherto little-known influence on the Australian Aboriginal activists of the 1920s of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, formed first in Jamaica and then spreading through the United States and carried across the world often by working seamen. He also points out that Aboriginal Australians, though closely attached to their own country and for many decades denied freedom of movement, have also travelled abroad, and in the process developed new insights into their situation at home. International travel made some of them aware that ‘others around the globe had shared similar tragedy under the weight of colonisation’. Marilyn Lake points out that in their focus on nations as imagined communities, historians have too often forgotten the importance of transnational racial identifications. She draws attention to W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1910 recognition of the ‘new religion’ of whiteness that was sweeping the world in the early twentieth century. She also argues that a key instrument of whiteness was the literacy or dictation test, and whereas previous studies of the White Australia Policy have recognised the influence of Natal in this regard, they have not noticed the American precedents in Mississippi in 1890 and the American Immigration Act of 1896. Such tests, she argues, worked to consolidate understandings of ‘race’ in terms of a dichotomy of whites and non-whites around the world.

The volume ends with an extended essay on Islamic India and its repression in nationalist Indian historiography. Given its origin and existence as an alternative to or critique of national history, transnational history as an idea and a practice has tended to be of particular interest to historians of the modern era, where the nation has been such an important organising principle, both intellectually and pedagogically. Yet, as Tony Ballantyne points out in his essay, it has also been important for historians of earlier periods in its stimulus to the study of large regions, most notably ‘Eurasia’, (including India, China, Central Asia and Europe), the Atlantic world (Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean) and the societies around the Indian Ocean (East Africa, South and Southeast Asia). The pre-modern aspect of transnational history is represented here in Patrick Wolfe’s contribution, which emphasises the long historical connections between Europe, the Mediterranean Islamic world including Muslim Spain, and Islamic India. Transnational approaches, broadly conceived, he reflects, can help us be wary of false homogenised images of Europe, or Islam, or India. ‘Europe’, he argues, cannot be seen as entirely distinct from Hindu or Islamic culture – they were intricately connected and mutually influencing. As a result, when Europe in the nineteenth century confronted Muslim India, it was also ‘returning to its own repressed’, a tradition of repression that has been perpetuated in both British and Indian nationalist historiography.

One final comment. This book is being published by ANU E Press, a new press focusing on online publication with print-on-demand book copies also available. Since the technology of access means many readers can read chapters singly, rather than in book form, we have endeavoured to ensure that each chapter can stand alone. What may be lost in the conversations between chapters will be made up, we hope, in the easy and open and inexpensive access to this work around the world. And that is transnational in spirit indeed.