Transnational history. What lies behind the label? Some reflections from the Early Modernist’s point of view

Bartolomé Yun Casalilla

doi:10.3989/chdj.2014.025

Abstract

This essay presents the transnational approach to history from an early modern historian’s perspective. It starts with a short historiographical review of the recent trends in this field, showing how the transnational approach has been used predominantly in the study of contemporary history. Distancing itself from purely terminological debates, the essay discusses how the transnational approach can also be contextualized as a tool to understand pre-modern European societies or, by extension, the history of societies that do not fit the modern notion of the nation and are not organized as nation states, emphasizing the heuristic possibilities of this approach. The essay concludes by recalling some important contributions made from this perspective, even when their authors do not use the term “trans-national”.

Highlights

En un intento de distanciarse de debates puramente terminológicos, se discute a continuación el modo en que esta perspectiva analítica nos puede ayudar a entender las sociedades de la época moderna europea o, por extensión, la historia de sociedades en las que los conceptos actuales de nación y estado nacional no articulan las formas de organización política
The idea was that, given what they considered to be the insuperable difficulties of comparing interlinked realities, it would be better to open a different approach aiming at analyzing the common relations between those realities.9. This almost coincided with another important development taking place again in the pages of The American Historical Review (2006), where the by- flourishing debate on transnational history was held among specialists on modern and contemporary history, but where we hardly find any reference to the German-French tradition (Bayly, 2006)
Considering all this, transnational history might be defined as an approach to the past which privileges the analysis of exchanges and mutual transfers across borders, be they political, religious, ethnic, etc.13, and which is concerned with mutual perceptions and with cross-national social relations and migration movements

Summary

On the ubiquity of transnational history

Today we have journals and forums on the web claiming to promote transnational hi story. Tyrrell and others launched a debate aiming at understanding the history of the USA from a transnational perspective, an expression the meaning of which was rather different from that employed in the German-French context For some of these scholars transnational history was associated with comparative history and it was a way to combat the so-called American exceptionalism. The idea was that, given what they considered to be the insuperable difficulties of comparing interlinked realities, it would be better to open a different approach aiming at analyzing the common relations between those realities.9 This almost coincided with another important development taking place again in the pages of The American Historical Review (2006), where the by- flourishing debate on transnational history was held among specialists on modern and contemporary history, but where we hardly find any reference to the German-French tradition (Bayly, 2006). The globalization process, which obliges us to understand the past in a context broader than the nation or the nation state, has had similar effects

Defining Transnational history

A trans-“national” history of earlymodern societies?