As a comparative historian interested in race and colonialism, I sometimes find myself wondering what all the fuss is about when people advocate transnational history. Putting the definitional niceties of the term ‘nation’ aside for the moment and using it, in a vernacular sense, as something like ‘country’, both race and colonialism are inherently transnational phenomena. Confronted with the call to transnationalise, therefore, the historian of race and colonialism might well recognise how Mark Twain must have felt on discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life. Even in internal-colonial contexts, at least one of the contending parties originally came from somewhere else, a fact that continues to demarcate the relationship. As often as not, this demarcation is inscribed in the language of race. I have argued that race is a regime of difference that has served to distinguish dominant groups from groups whom they initially encountered in colonial contexts.^[1] These contexts were inherently spatial, the groups involved having previously been geographically separate. Thus we might adapt Mary Douglas’ celebrated dictum that dirt is matter out of place^[2] to human dirt, the racialised, who are constructed as fundamentally contaminatory. It would be hard to find a construct of race that has not involved concepts of spatiality and contamination, usually in association. Hence the frequency with which the racialised are spatially segregated to hygienic ends. This principle has not been particular to the modern discourse of race, which emerged in company with colonies and nations.^[3] Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, enduring proto-forms of European racism, applied internally and externally respectively: to the Jew within, who characteristically ‘wandered’ – a spatial determination – from ghetto to ghetto, and to the Saracen, Turk or Mahomedan, who threatened – and thereby constituted – the borders of Christendom from without.

To deal with race and colonialism is, therefore, to take transnationalism (or, before the nation state, some form of transregionalism) for granted. Again, therefore, what is all the fuss about? It seems to me that transnational history’s radical potential is a matter of its address. Until relatively recently, the call to transnationalism has been largely confined to historians of the United States (this is despite the fact that its principal advocate has been an Australian, Ian Tyrrell).^[4] Transnational historians have critiqued the Anglocentric historiography in which the United States has figured as miraculously conceived from Puritan sources, pointing to the formative contributions of Native American, African, Spanish, French, Chinese, Irish and other nations. To this extent, transnational history is a subset of United States minority history writing or, more broadly, of history from below. Self-consciously transnational histories differ from the generality of minority accounts, however, in insisting on the migrations and other global transactions that preceded and continue to underlie minority status in United States society. The nation is not axiomatic. For transnational history – and here pan-Africanism may be seen as paradigmatic^[5] – minorities have pre-United States genealogies to which space is central.

But to say that the call to transnational history has been directed to historians of the United States and not to historians of colonialism raises obvious problems. One has only to mention Native Americans or African Americans for the incoherence of the distinction to be patent. Thus the issue is not one of distinguishing between histories of colonialism on the one hand and histories of United States society on the other. It is about how and why that false distinction came to be established. What kind of exceptionalism is it that absolves United States history from – or, perhaps, enclaves it within – the global narrative of European colonialism? In promising to dismantle that solipsistic historiography, transnational history has a radical potential that can be compared to the postcolonial project of dismantling the sovereign subjecthood of the West. For this potential to be realised, however, transnational history will have to extend its purview beyond its current, unfortunately narcissistic preoccupation with White-settler societies.^[6] Accordingly, while it is refreshing that transnational history should now be establishing a foothold in Australia, whose White-settler national mythology has historical correspondences with that of the United States, we should remain mindful of the varied range of colonial social formations.

The exclusion of minority genealogies in favour of a dominant group’s monopolosing of the national narrative has been a commonplace of accounts of the nation since Ernest Renan’s famous 1882 lecture on the forgetting that is central to nationalism.^[7] This kind of selective amnesia would seem to be particularly congenial to settler-colonial nationalism. After all, settler colonialism strives for the elimination of the native in favour of an unmediated connection between the settlers and the land – hence the notion of building clone-like fragments of the mother country in the wilderness. In this fantasy, nobody else is involved, just settlers and the natural landscape. Such a situation is clearly conducive to solipsistic narratives. On this basis, it is not surprising that transnational history should be developing in settler societies.

Yet the screening-out of other contributions may well be endemic to the nation state formation itself, rather than particular to its settler-colonial variant. This consideration suggests ways in which we might widen the scope of transnational history writing. Moreover, the very distinction between European and settler societies occludes the actual histories of European state formation (think, for instance, of Norman England, the Basques in France and Spain, or the Nazi lebensraum in eastern Europe). In this light, one could cite the Comte de Boulainviller, in early eighteenth century France, as a metropolitan precursor to self-consciously transnational history writing. In a nice conflation of race and class, Boulainviller reduced French history to a contest between a ‘race’ of external conquerors, the Francs, and the native Gauls, the invaders becoming the ruling class by right of conquest.^[8] In classic settler-colonial style, this involved Boulainviller in basing his own class’s claim to dominance on their not being native. In settling, though, and asserting their transcendent bond to the territory of France, they became so. By contrast, European authorities in franchise colonies such as British India or the Netherlands East Indies did not, in the main, come to stay. They remained as agents of the metropolitan power, their agenda being the aggrandisement rather than the cloning of the metropolis. In such colonies, nationalist momentum came from among the ranks of the natives. They, rather than the colonisers, proclaimed an eternal bond between themselves and the land. Yet the historiography of franchise-colonial nationalisms, unlike that of settler nationalisms in dominion territories, is unproblematically transnational. There has not, for instance, been a struggle to write Indians into the history of British India to compare with the scholarly energy that had to go into finding Aborigines a place in the Australian national narrative.^[9] In this light, the core issue that transnational history problematises is the core characteristic of the nation state itself: the assertion of privileged affinities between particular groups of people and particular parcels of land. Stated in these more general terms, transnational history has no necessary confinement to settler societies in the West. I wish to argue that, by adopting a transnational approach to other situations, we can contribute to the postcolonial project that Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed the provincialising of Europe.^[10]

In what follows, I intend to revisit a topic that I have previously written about, only this time in a more self-consciously transnational manner. In a critique of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, I noted that, for all their differences, Hindu nationalism and British colonialism had concurred over the exclusion of Indian Islam from the colonial encounter. In particular, they had shared the assumption – embarrassing for anti-colonial nationalists, affirming for their colonisers – that key features of Indian nationalist discourse were themselves a colonial endowment inherited from the European rationalist tradition. Using the example of the early nineteenth century Bengali reformer Rammohun Roy, I argued that this widely-held assumption was not only misleading but could only be maintained so long as the Indian Islamic tradition was overlooked; that key rationalist premises attributed to the European enlightenment could be found already expressed in Indian Islamic discourse, where they testified to a post-Hellenistic Arabic-language inheritance which, as a result of the translation movement in al-Andalus, had also bolstered the European Renaissance. In returning to Islamic rationalism by way of India, colonising Europe was returning to its own repressed. Bringing a transcontinental Islamic inheritance together with Indian nationalism and British colonialism, the analysis was manifestly, albeit inadvertently, transnational (not to say transhistorical). Nonetheless, al-Andalus hardly fits the nation state category, while the ‘nation’ of Indian nationalism was still at a very early stage of its imagining, so the discussion was also somewhat unorthodox in transnationalist terms – as, of course, was its application to a non-Western, non-settler colonial context. Moreover, the analysis sought to decentre Islamophobia, instancing the contradictory variety of Islamophobic legacies involved in the current global malaise. On all these grounds, and trying to keep repetition to a minimum, I would now like to return to the analysis with a more informed transnational awareness, in the hope of casting some light on what might be called the creole genealogy of Western imperialism.^[11]