Transnational History: Writing history beyond the borders of nation-states

【Roundtable Dialogue】

Editor's note

Since the professionalization of history in the 19th century, the nation-state has been the protagonist of history writing. With the development of economic globalization, especially in the past two or three decades, scholars have begun to try to transcend the boundaries of nation-states and re-examine historical events and figures from the perspective and framework of transnational history, and historical research has undergone a "transnational turn". The rise of transnational history has broadened the theme and path of historical research, enriched the content of historical research, and become a major hot spot in historical research, while controversies around transnational history have always existed, including the discussion of its conceptual definition, scope of application, and relationship with nation-state historiography. This journal invites three scholars to explore the rise, definition, limitations and relationship between transnational historical research and nation-state historiography in combination with their respective research fields, in order to explore and answer related questions.

Guests

Professor Pang Guanqun, School of History, Beijing Normal University

Cao Yin, associate professor of history at Tsinghua University

Wu Bin, associate professor of the School of History and Culture, Northeast Normal University

compere

Guangming Daily reporter Zhou Xiaofei

1. Why did the study of transnational history emerge? What is transnational history?

Moderator: British historian Christopher Hill said: "Every generation needs to rewrite history, because although the past does not change, reality is constantly changing, and each generation asks new questions about the past, discovers new areas that are similar [to the present], and reproduces different aspects of the experience of its predecessors." In the second half of the 20th century, some Western historians began to try to break the shackles of the nation-state framework, focusing on the theme of crossing the boundaries of the nation-state, opening the trend of "transnational turn" in historical research.

Wu Bin: The rise of transnational history is a reflection on the historiography of traditional nation-states. The professionalization of history in the 19th century coincided with the rise of nationalism in Europe, which had a great influence on the development of historiography. The nation-state has increasingly become the basic unit of human activities, political economy, social culture and other dimensions, and its history has naturally become the protagonist of history writing. History has become "a study that traces how the nation-state evolved and developed," with the mission of teaching the people and creating national identities. It can be said that the rise of professional historiography is closely related to the development of nationalism.

However, with the development of historiography, the focus on the nation-state of history has gradually become limited, and some human experiences beyond the nation-state cannot be included in this historical interpretation. American historian Lynn Hunt points out, "As early as the 50s of the 20th century, the nation-state narrative was criticized in Western Europe and the United States, and this situation was particularly evident in the United States. Political history, especially the study of the behavior of the upper echelons of government or political elites, no longer meets the needs of a diverse and educated public." Historians began to challenge the dominance of the study of national history. Under this shock, the content of historical research gradually extends beyond the borders of the nation-state. In addition, the development of economic globalization has prompted historians to pay attention to the impact of various interactive networks on human experience, and there is a strong demand for historical research to go beyond the narrative of the nation-state, and transnational history should emerge from time to time. Since the end of the 80s of the 20th century, transnational history has increasingly become an important branch and path method of historical research.

Pang Guanqun: The rise of transnational history presupposes the use of the concept of transnational borders. The term "transnational" was first used in the U.S. economy in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, especially in relation to multinational corporations. As early as 1962, the French sociologist Raymond Aron used the term "transnational society" to describe the interaction between non-state actors, including trade, migration, and the exchange of ideas. In 1970-1971, American political scientists Robert Keohan and Joseph Nye organized a conference on "transnational relations." They stressed the importance of phenomena that transcended national borders and called on researchers to examine transnational organizations and their interactions. Obviously, the rise of transnational history is later than the discussion of transnational issues in the field of social sciences, and it is the relevant discussions in the field of social sciences that promote the thinking of global history and transnational history in the field of history. Western historians such as Ian Tyrell introduced the concept of transnational history in the early 90s, examining the impact of transnational connections on world history and exploring how to write history beyond the borders of nation-states.

In addition, the study of "cultural migration" that emerged in the 80s of the 20th century also had a profound impact on transnational history. French scholars Michel Esbagne and Michael Werner made the concept of "cultural migration" famous, in linguistics, literature, and philosophy, studying the inter-borrowing of ideas, discourses and texts from the French and German cultural spaces in the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on how elements of one culture were transferred, transformed and accepted into another. Although migration studies still uses the nation-state as the main unit of analysis, it provides an important conceptual approach for transnational historians. Today, transnational history has occupied an important place in the field of historiography, and the issues discussed and perspectives adopted are diverse and open.

Cao Yin: Actually, the rise of transnational history in different countries and regions has its own different background and context, so it needs to be treated differently. In the United States, the rise of area studies during the Cold War provided history departments in American universities with a large number of scholars who studied the history of non-Western regions. But history departments at most universities are still dominated by Western history, so scholars who specialize in Chinese, Ghanaian, or Egyptian history are on the margins. In addition to teaching history in these countries, they are often asked to design and teach history courses in Asia, Africa, or the Arab world. The background of their training in area studies and the pedagogical requirements for teaching broader world history have led these historians to come to appreciate the importance of transnational connections in the course of human history. At the same time, the United States, as a country of immigrants, provides a lot of material for transnational historical research. In the 90s of the 20th century, the end of the Cold War and the intensification of economic globalization further prompted these historians to think about the "flow" and "interaction" in human history, and the study of transnational history has therefore received more and more attention and discussion in the United States (especially in the regions on the east and west coasts that are deeply influenced by immigrant culture).

The development of transnational historical studies in Europe is different from that in the United States. In Britain, traditional British imperial history is naturally characterized by transnational history, but the problem with this traditional British imperial history is that it overemphasizes the influence of the metropolis on individual colonies. The "new imperial history" that emerged in the 80s of the 20th century began to try to restore the subjectivity of the colony and its indigenous people, but the linear pattern of two-way interaction between the metropolis and the colony was not broken. In the 21st century, some scholars have begun to call attention to the interaction between colonies in imperial structures, injecting new perspectives into the transnational turn of imperial history. At present, British universities such as the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Warwick have offered transnational history courses and postgraduate programmes based on imperial history.

In recent years, German historians have become increasingly interested in the study of transnational history. On the one hand, it may be stimulated by the European integration process, and on the other hand, it is also the demand for global expansion of German multinational companies. With funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and the Volkswagen Foundation, institutions such as Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt University, University of Konstanz, and Heidelberg University offer postgraduate courses in transnational history. Unlike the United States and Britain, the study of transnational history in Germany is more rooted in its Orientalist tradition.

Since the 21st century, the study of transnational history has also become a fashion in China, which is closely related to the "Belt and Road" initiative and the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind. Capital Normal University and Beijing University of Foreign Chinese have successively established the Global History Research Center, and Tsinghua University and Peking University have also opened courses related to global history and transnational history, and the study of transnational history is receiving more and more attention.

Moderator: Since the rise of transnational history, it has been supported by many scholars, and at the same time, there have been debates, including the definition of its conceptual connotation.

Wu Bin: There are many definitions of transnational history in academia, but they are similar. I think Professor Xu Guoqi of the University of Hong Kong summarized what "transnational history" is. In a nutshell, transnational history aims to break the limitations of the nation-state and study history in the context of the international system and culture; Focus on the significance of non-governmental and non-official factors such as transnational migration, non-governmental organizations, diseases, and the environment in human history; focus on the use of multilingual, multilateral archives; Emphasizing "bottom-up" research on history, cultural factors and various non-governmental transnational connections have become important contents of transnational history research.

The rapid development of transnational history over the past 30 years is a reaction to the changing perception of space among historians. The rise of global and international history is also an expression of this reaction. The development of transnational history has even had an impact on global history. Lynn Hunt points out that "most global history is transnational and comparative, not truly global." In fact, the close connection between transnational history and global history makes it difficult to separate the two. Both share the goal of moving beyond "container thinking". However, the focus is not the same. Global history pays more attention to structural changes and integration with global impact, and analyzes causal relationships from a global level. Transnational history, on the other hand, tends to focus on the interaction between several regions of the world. Some scholars have compared transnational history with international history, and in fact there are also differences in research interests between the two. International history focuses on the political dimension, while transnational history focuses on the study of the socio-cultural dimension. In general, the similarities between transnational history, global history, and international history in terms of research perspectives and interests are much greater than the differences between them, and there is no clear boundary between the three. They all focus on the networks of flows, exchanges, and cross-border processes that break down "centrist" narratives from a perspective that transcends the nation-state. In addition, their focus on space also challenges the tradition of time-centered historical research, and jointly promotes the "spatial turn" of historical research.

Pang Guanqun: Transnational history is a historical research approach that seeks to transcend the boundaries of the nation-state without denying the framework of the nation-state, focusing on the important role played by the transnational flow of people, goods, technologies, and cultures in the formation of modernity. It offers a new way to think about the interaction and exchange of different spaces, with a particular focus on flows that arise outside the relationship between states.

According to the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, published in 2009, transnational history can be considered part of global history, and the editors do not make a radical distinction between the two concepts. However, transnational history still retains the dimension of the state conceptually, while the concept of global history itself emphasizes transcending the nation-state.

The term "international" emphasizes relations between sovereign states, and international history is concerned with international affairs consisting of complex relations between states; Transnational history, on the other hand, places more emphasis on non-state actors, such as associations or networks that operate outside national borders. However, transnational and international history also intersect, for example, environmental issues involve both the interaction between States and the actions of non-governmental organizations.

Cao Yin: As far as I have observed, discussions about the conceptual differences between transnational history and global history tend to be vague and do not help much in practical research. In my opinion, there is no essential difference between transnational history and global history, and in most cases they can be interused. Both are built on a reflection on the historical narrative paradigm of the nation-state, both emphasizing the flow and interaction of people, goods, ideas, and institutions beyond the boundaries of the modern nation-state. It should be pointed out that transnational history and global history are a method of historical research through the perspective of connection or comparison, rather than a field of research with specific temporal and spatial boundaries. Thus, we can use the transnational historical method to study the flow of goods in Eurasia in the 3rd century BC, and we can use the same method to discuss the formation of Indian ethnic communities on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean in the 19th century. Transnational history is often studied with non-state actors.

Unlike transnational history and global history, international history focuses more on the relationship between modern nation-states since the 19th century, and its focus is more on the political, diplomatic, and military spheres at the national level. Therefore, issues such as Anglo-German relations in the early days of World War I and diplomatic games at the Paris Peace Conference belong to the category of international history rather than transnational history.

2. Innovation and limitations of transnational historical research

Moderator: The rise of transnational history has expanded the scope of historical research, broadened the research horizons of historians, and its research results have also challenged some traditional concepts. Experts are invited to talk about the pioneering and innovative aspects of transnational history research in light of their own research fields.

Wu Bin: Cross-border migration has a natural transnational nature. Therefore, at the beginning of the rise of transnational history, several books on the history of transnational migration have been published in the field of migration history that have attracted widespread attention from the academic community, and they have shown a trend of expansion in the past ten years. These achievements go beyond previous historical narratives of migration based on the nation-state, and have promoted the development of migration historiography in depth and breadth, and individual studies have revised relevant theories.

British historian Frank Thiszwaite, German historian Dirk Holder, Canadian scholar Bruno Ramirez and others have been active in the study of transatlantic, transpacific, and trans-American migration, integrating the migration experience into larger, global migration narratives. British historian Margaret Frentz's book "Community, Memory and Migration in a Globalized World" combines transnational history with new cultural history, examining the multi-layered, long-term historical experience of the Goans in India that has been neglected by scholars for a long time. These results have greatly enriched the spatial scope and research content of the study of migration history.

In addition, traditional studies of migration history have an ethnocentric overtone, emphasizing the specificity of one's own ethnic group. In addition to advancing the field in depth and breadth, the study of the history of transnational migration also weakens ethnocentrism and promotes interethnic understanding.

Cao Yin: Taking Indian history as an example, in the first half of the 20th century, the study of Indian history in international academia was mainly influenced by the European oriental tradition and the Hindu nationalist movement. At this stage, most research revolves around state units and elite perspectives. Since the 70s of the 20th century, under the influence of neo-Marxist historiography and new cultural history, the "Dalit Studies School" of Indian history was born. Scholars began to deconstruct the grand narratives of the elites of colonialism and nationalist historiography, in an attempt to restore the historical agency of India's grassroots marginalized groups. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the low-level focus perspective of the "Dalit School" and the research methods of transnational history have gradually converged in the study of modern and modern Indian history, and a number of achievements have emerged to explore the relationship between the transnational flow of grassroots marginal ethnic groups in India and the Indian nation-state and modern world system. Amres of Yale University's History Department shows how their migrations shaped the political, economic structures and ecological environments of South and Southeast Asia through the excavation and recreation of the experiences of the Tamil stratum who traveled between India's southeast coast and the Malay Peninsula in the 19th and 20th centuries. I myself have used transnational historical methods to study the Sikh population in Punjab India. In the framework of previous nation-state historiography, the role of the Sikh community in the Hindu nationalist movement has not received enough attention, and the academic community generally believes that Hindus and secularists are the protagonists of the Hindu nationalist movement. But I found that Sikhs who migrated to places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and North America in the early 20th century were the backbone of India's national independence movement. They actively organized and planned anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements throughout Asia by using their immigrant networks throughout Asia, which strongly promoted the process of India's independence. But the deeds of these transnational groups are forgotten in the historical narrative of the Indian nation-state. In 2021, Datta of Idaho State University published a monograph entitled "The Social History of Working Women in Indian in British Malaya", which further promoted the combination of Indian history and transnational history methods. She found that Indian female laborers who came to Malaya in the 19th and 20th centuries developed a collective gender consciousness in the high-pressure management and exploitative relationships of plantations, and developed a unique concept of resistance. Their struggle against patriarchal family structures, plantation capitalism and colonialism profoundly influenced the political process and social family structure in India and Malaya. These studies show that transnational historical methods are becoming more and more widely used in the study of Indian history, helping us to further deconstruct the myths of colonial and nationalist historiography.

Pang Guanqun: The transnational turn in the study of French history, at the macro level, Bu Jong's "History of the French World" (2017), which selects 146 representative years, explains the relationship and interaction between France and the outside world through things, people and events at specific moments, and writes French history from the perspective of the world. Stovall's Beyond France's Borders (2015) examines the history of France from the Revolution from a transnational perspective, explores France's relations with the rest of Europe, the French colonies, and the United States, revealing that its universalist tradition dominates France's interactions with other countries and regions. At the meso level, the history of French colonial empires from a transatlantic perspective has attracted much attention in recent years, thanks to the formation of the concept of the "French Atlantic" in the early 21st century. This type of research explores how French Atlantic societies were shaped by transoceanic colonial networks, telling the history of the enslaved perspective; It also focuses on the impact of the Atlantic economy on mainland France, exploring the origins of the Revolution from a transnational perspective. Science, knowledge, and the environment are also key words in Atlantic World studies. Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (2008) presents the formation of scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world in the early modern period and its relationship with the colonial order from a comparative and transnational perspective. Christopher Parsons' Not So New World (2018) teases out the perception and shaping of the environment of the New World by French colonists in the 18th century and the resulting flow of knowledge in the Atlantic. At the micro level, migration and refugee issues are inherently transnational in nature. For example, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, French Huguenots fled to other European countries, North America, the Caribbean, South Africa and other places, and Global Refuge: Huguenots in the Age of Empire (2020) is a study on Huguenot immigration. Another example is the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees during the Spanish Civil War, and thousands of their children fled Spain to be resettled and cared for in France. Several recent studies have focused on this neglected refugee history of children. The study of transnational historical memory of famous battles is also at the micro level, such as on the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, Forrest discusses the shaping of the historical memory of this battle in European countries. In short, the study of transnational history has a strong openness, which provides an effective research path for new fields such as knowledge history and memory history, and also injects vitality into traditional fields such as revolutionary history and war history.

Moderator: The transnational turn in historical research has been called a "historiographical revolution" by Akira Irie, an American diplomatic historian and professor at Harvard University. While transnational history changes the traditional concept of historiography and updates the paradigm of historical research, what problems and challenges also exist?

Wu Bin: "Transnational" book history, both in content and method, has opened up new horizons for historical research, re-written many old narratives, and deepened the understanding of overall history. However, it also has limitations. Taking the history of migration as an example, transnational migration involves multi-layered social fields, and in order to truly understand the transnational activities and experiences of migrants, it is necessary to carry out research in these complex contexts. If the relationship between subnational, national and supranational levels is not fully taken into account, the analysis of the relationship between migrants and indigenous populations will be flawed and biased. This is often beyond the ability of a single researcher, and it is no longer easy to narrate history across borders, and it is even more difficult to grasp causality using multilingual transnational historical sources in complex interactive networks.

In addition to its unique research difficulties, transnational historical research may also have the problem of arbitrarily interpreting history. According to the Australian historian Ian Taylor, transnational history can lead to the simplification of history, "measuring history on a single scale of relevance, thus ignoring the diversity of development trajectories and the impact of past developments."

Cao Yin: In 2017, Adelman, a historian at Princeton University, published "What is Global History Now?" on an online platform. , caused a sensation in the academic community. The end of the Cold War and the acceleration of economic globalization have fueled optimism among the public, capital, and policymakers that progress in human society depends on broad connections and interactions. Academia caters to this optimism, widely promoting transnational history (global history) with connections and interactions at its core. However, many studies on the historical connection and interaction of human society are not only superficial, lack problem awareness and criticism, but even endorse the unequal and unsustainable globalization process under the neoliberal order of the world today. Adelman found that researchers who focused on historical cross-border connections and interactions were also the beneficiaries of connections and interactions in today's world, and they focused more on political, economic, and cultural elites capable of moving freely across borders. I think Adelman points out a common problem in transnational historical research, which is to focus only on superficial transnational connections and interactions, but not to dig into the power relations behind these connections and interactions. Some groups benefit from cross-border connections and interactions, but we should also be mindful of the majority of marginalized groups at the grassroots level who do not move freely. Not only are many of them unable to participate in mobility and connection, but they even suffer from elite-dominated inequality and unsustainable relationships. Having said that, we have to ask the question: What is the ultimate concern of transnational historical research? If transnational history is seen only as a complement to the historical narrative of the nation-state, it will not be able to escape the grand narrative of the elite of nation-state historiography. I believe that transnational history should be used as a critical tool to understand more deeply the inequalities in the flow of transnational species, populations, commodities, knowledge, and institutions, and to explore and restore the voices of the weak in these flows. In short, we must always be wary of the idea that transnational history is seen as a platform for historical legitimacy for meritocracy-led economic globalization so that it does not become a booster of power and capital.

Pang Guanqun: I think that cross-border history research should avoid excessively exalting exogenous explanations and ignoring endogenous explanations. The French historian David Bell has profoundly criticized this tendency in the study of French revolutionary history under the influence of transnational and global turns, exaggerating the place of slavery and colonial riots in the political discussion of the Revolution. This means that transnational history may bring marginal issues to the center of historical research, and may blur the relationship between central issues and marginal issues. Transnational turns, like other turns in history, can change the way we look at problems, such as revisiting power relations from the perspective of the dispossessed. But the dizzying array of turns won't completely replace old ways of research.

In my opinion, the challenges of transnational history mainly stem from the difficulty of collecting and studying multilingual primary materials. Pierre-Yves Sonier, a pioneer in the study of transnational history in France, pointed out that transnational historians must study primary materials (whether archives or not), and only when they slowly explore the original materials can they see the various flows, connections and relationships. Transnational history is not a collage of the histories of several countries. To reconstruct specific connections and flows across borders, regions, and even continents in more detail, the support of primary sources is required. This means that transnational historians need to be proficient in multiple languages to work with primary materials, and be able to combine microscopic research with macroscopic perspectives, comparing and analyzing complex materials into a unified interpretive framework.

3. The relationship between transnational history and nation-state historiography

Moderator: The study of transnational history seems to have become a trend, but some scholars criticize that it focuses on the shaping of domestic history by transnational factors, and the position of the nation-state in historical research and historical writing seems to have weakened. Experts are invited to talk about the relationship between transnational history and nation-state historiography.

Wu Bin: Historical research can go beyond the nation-state. But at least for the foreseeable future, the nation-state will remain the absolute protagonist of the writing of history. If transnational history ignores or even ignores nation-states, it is undoubtedly putting the cart before the horse. As Wang Lixin puts it, "transnational history is a complement to, not a substitute for, the historical framework of the state," Irie argues that "the nation-state is, of course, still a key interpretive framework for understanding history, and its importance will not diminish for the foreseeable future." "Transnational" is more "transnational" under the dominance of sovereign states. Thus, the sovereign state remains an inescapable reference for any transnational study since the emergence of the nation-state. Georg Eagles and Wang Qingjia also point out that "the nation-state has not actually disappeared, on the contrary, although transnational governments such as the European Union have been created, the nation-state has even expanded its function." Transnational history is only more applicable to certain particular issues and areas than to other methods.

Cao Yin: At present, most academic works emphasize their complementarity and reflection on the historical narrative of the nation-state when using the transnational historical method. If we delve into the current popular transnational history research, we will find that many transnational history studies are political, economic, and cultural elites that have the ability to move freely, and the ideas, institutions, and goods associated with them. From this point of view, there is a commonality between these transnational historical studies and nation-state historiography, that is, they are limited by grand narratives and elite perspectives, and lack empathy and concern for grassroots marginalized groups, non-human species, and the natural environment. Realizing that transnational history may have the same problems as nation-state historiography, in recent years, more and more scholars have begun to apply the methods and theories of grassroots people's research, environmental history and microhistory to the study of transnational history, and then truly link transnational history with grassroots care. Related representative works include Davis's "The Way of the Walker", Corey's "The Tribulation of Elizabeth Marsh: A World History of a Woman", Xia Deming's "The Global Entanglement of People on Earth: Zhu Zongyuan and His Conflicting World", Shen Aidi's "The Missionary's Curse: A Global History of a North China Village", and so on. Thus, transnational history should aim to reflect on the grand narratives of the elite behind the historiography of the nation-state.

Pang Guanqun: In the 19th century, when the nation-state was constructed, professional historiography formed a tradition of celebrating the glorious rise of the nation and telling the legend of the nation. To a large extent, transnational history is a historical narrative that breaks through and challenges the exceptionalism of the country, which constructs the uniqueness of the national culture and historical development of the country, and forms a national-centered view of history. The study of national history from the perspective of transnational history and global history takes a critical look at so-called unique things and emphasizes that the nation-state is shaped by the external environment. In the introduction to The One State, the American historian Thomas Bender argues that the nation-state is not enough to form its own historical background, and that all major themes and events in American history should be viewed in the context of global history. The French historian Christophe Charles agreed with Bend's approach and believed that it could be transplanted to the study of French and other European histories.

Transnational history should not only dissolve national legends, but also face the burden of history and the pressure of memory, such as facing up to the disgraceful role played by colonial empires in slavery, slave trade, and colonial exploitation. This approach is also in response to the current contradictions and dilemmas brought about by racial and cultural diversity.

Transnational history is not to completely abandon the historical narrative of the nation-state, but to revise it and supplement it, but when we face the problem of history education, there is still a deep contradiction between the two. If all national legends that emphasize the historical identity of the country are dissolved, it will raise concerns in history teaching to weaken national ties, which is an important topic in the discussion of French history teaching in 2015. To a large extent, the enthusiasm for transnational history research stems from the rapid progress of economic globalization in the 90s of the 20th century, but the development of the new century shows that the nation-state is still strong and still plays a central role in world affairs. Therefore, future historiography should pay attention to achieving a balance between transnational history and nation-state historiography.

Guang Ming Daily(2023-07-10, version 14)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily