National and Transnational Spaces: Academic Networks and Scholarly Transfer Between Britain and Germany in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Traditionally seen as the epoch of the nation state, historians have recently begun to question the dominance of this category for those living, working, and travelling in nineteenth-century Europe. Frequently, transnational movement of people, money, and ideas had a greater impact than movement within national boundaries and under the supervision of individual states. As such, the nineteenth century is perhaps better understood as an era of increasing globalisation. While scholars have recently done much to emphasise the importance of supranational contexts in the area of economic transactions, the history of universities and knowledge transfer is still dominated by the category of the nation state. This essay attempts to challenge this tendency by pointing to the creation and growing importance of transnational university networks over the course of the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on the development of a wide range of contacts between universities based in Britain and Germany including student migration and exchanges, collaborative projects, and joint publications. In particular, it argues that intellectual and cultural links which flourished under older political formations, in particular the eighteenth-century constitutional union between England and the Electorate of Hanover, survived to determine the nature of cultural contact between Britain and Germany in the following century. In the wider context of continental Europe, the essay also points to the longevity of an early-modern paradigm of intellectual relations—the “republic of letters” in which transnational collaboration and exchange played a normal and important part.