On Transnational and International History

Abstract

In 2006, the American Historical Review published “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” and it remains to date among the journal’s most downloaded articles.1 The conversation featured six established historians discussing the so-called transnational turn in the discipline, offering reflections on both the many possibilities and the challenges of researching and writing history that moved across traditional geographic divisions. Nearly two decades later, this transnational history is no longer novel. Indeed, it has become an established approach in the discipline for scholars in almost every subfield. Flows, circuits, transnational actors, mobilities, and exchanges are seemingly everywhere. Sixteen years on, what should we make of the transnational turn? How has it usefully transformed our historical practice? And what might have gotten lost in the centrality it accorded to flows and movement? This forum brings together a dozen younger and mid-career scholars, most of whom came up in our discipline well after the transnational turn had taken place. They were invited to contribute with an eye toward exploring the broad chronological, thematic and spatial range of histories that have come to be called transnational. There are medievalists in the group along with historians of the early modern and of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And their own research and writing spans across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. We asked them to reflect upon the larger meanings of their own work in this field as a way of capturing the challenges and satisfactions in working on a transnational canvas. As you will see, their essays are often deeply personal, and most reflect upon the effect of, perhaps, the greatest global event of our generation—the COVID-19 pandemic—on the lives of scholars and on the field.