Is It Global History’s Moment?

Abstract

Is It Global History’s Moment? Carol L. Higham (bio) Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2019. vi + 189 pp. Epilogue, index. $44.95. Andrew Offenburger, Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, & Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S. -Mexican Borderlands, 1880–1917. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xv + 299 pp. Note on orthography, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. For over thirty years, global history of the American West has been on the cusp of having its moment. Beginning with Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson’s comparative work, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (1983), which first linked the American West to the South African frontier and others, scholars have touted a more global approach as the way to critically re-evaluate American history, and the frontier and the West in particular. In her recent essay, “When Western History Tried to Reinvent Itself: Revisionism, Controversy, and the Reception of the New Western History,” (2021) Natalie Massip discusses the recent calls for globalizing the history of the American West. Assertions such as Kerwin Klein’s Frontiers of Historical Imagination (1997), and Jeremy Adelman and Steven Aron’s “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” (1999) suggest that placing the American West in a global context would revitalize the field and provide a more critical understanding of the colonial past of the nation. They seek to move the history of the American West from a regional study to a global one by reclaiming the importance of the frontier, using settler colonialism as a framework with which to analyze the West, and dismantling the idea of exceptionalism. Beyond these theoretical ideas of how to globalize the American West, a set of parallel movements have emerged: transnational and comparative history. Transnational history represents the study of themes, peoples, and ideas that cross borders and nationalities. Two excellent examples would be Sam Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2008) and Beth Ladow’s The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (2013). Truett’s work, which straddles borderlands and transnational [End Page 435] history, set a standard for defining a region and place through the eyes of the historical actors. His term, “fugitive landscapes,” which he used to describe the ebb and flow of control of the borderland regions, presents an example for other historians of how to abandon nation-state definitions for more accurate regional or borderlands ones. Ladow’s work introduced the idea that historical actors ignored or invoked the nation-state as needed and that Indigenous peoples continued to define the land beyond the nation-state. Her work revitalized how historians of the Indigenous populations of the American and Canadian Wests viewed place, frontier, and borderlands. Transnational history beyond North America represents a trickier subject as an historian needs to find a global link like an industry, missionary work, or a specific policy, thereby limiting the scholarship. Comparative history utilizes some of the same methodologies as trans-national history by either comparing a similar process in different places or comparing similar places experiencing different processes. Lamar and Thompson’s work seeks to trace the frontier through different places. It presents one of the foremost problems facing the practice of comparative history: the need to master the historiographies, sources, and even languages, of two or more places. Thus, the work was an edited volume with specific chapters on specific frontiers and summative analysis at the beginning and end. For a single author, the task seems daunting, yet some scholars have ably managed it. Steve Sabol’s “The Touch of Civilization”: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization (2017) represents the rare case where a single author possesses the language and historiographic skills to compare disparate regions and peoples, in this case the Kazakh and the Sioux. By comparing similar policies of dispossession and assimilation in seemingly dissimilar places, Sabol discovers that many outsiders saw these transitions as a transnational process. In a similar manner, Tolly Bradford’s Prophetic Identities: Indigenous Missionaries on British Colonial Frontiers, 1850–1875 (2012) compares...