Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2009
This article situates the idea of ‘transnational history’ within the recent historiography of the United States, as both a reaction against and accommodation to the nation-state focus of that historiography. It explains transnational history's specific American development as a broad project of research to contextualize US history and decentre the nation; it explores the conditions of American historical practice that influenced the genesis and growth of this version of transnational history; and it compares the concept with competitor terms such as international history, comparative history, global history, histoire croisée, and trans-border. In the United States, transnational history came to be considered complementary to these concepts in its commitment to render American historiography less parochial, yet, because of its origins, the concept has remained limited in application by period and spatial scope. While the concept retains utility because of its specific research programme to denaturalize the nation, transnational history understood as an exploration of ‘transnational spaces’ opens possibilities for an approach of more general historiographical relevance.
1 ‘AHR forum: entangled empires in the Atlantic World’, American Historical Review, 112, 3, 2007, ‘Introduction’, pp. 710–11; Eliga H. Gould, ‘Entangled histories, entangled worlds: the English-speaking Atlantic as a Spanish periphery’, American Historical Review, 112, 3, 2007, pp. 764–86; ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’, with C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, American Historical Review, 111, 5, 2006, pp. 1440–64; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison: histoire croisée and the challenge of reflexivity’, History and Theory, 45, 1, 2006, pp. 30–50; Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ‘Comparative history, cross-national history, transnational history: definitions’, in Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and history, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. ix–xxiv; Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘“Transnations” among “transnations”? The debate on transnational history in the United States and Germany’, Center for European Studies Working Paper Series, 159, 2008, http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/CES_159.pdf (consulted 25 June 2009).
2 See, for example, Pieke, Frank N., Nyíri, Pál, Thunø, Mette, and Ceddagno, Antonella, Transnational Chinese: Fujianese migrants in Europe, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Sucheng Chan, ed., The flow of people, resources, and ideas between China and America during the exclusion era, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006; Benton, Gregor and Gomez, E. T., Chinese in Britain, 1800–2000: economy, transnationalism, identity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007Google Scholar; McKeown, Adam, Chinese migrant networks and cultural change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001Google Scholar; Erik van der Vleuten, ‘Toward a transnational history of technology: meanings, promises, pitfalls’, Technology and Culture, 49, 4, 2008, pp. 974–94; For a general view of diasporas studies, see Carol R. Ember, Melvin Ember, and Ian A. Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of diasporas: immigrant and refugee cultures around the world, New York and Boston, MA: Springer, 2004.
3 Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Learning by doing: notes about the making of the Palgrave dictionary of transnational history’, Journal of Modern European History, 6, 2, 2008, pp. 159–80.
4 Ian Tyrrell, ‘American exceptionalism in an age of international history’, American Historical Review, 96, 4, 1991, pp. 1031–55; Michael McGerr, ‘The price of the “new transnational history”’, American Historical Review, 96, 4, 1991, pp. 1056–67; Ian Tyrrell, ‘Ian Tyrrell responds’, American Historical Review, 96, 4, 1991, pp. 1068–72.
5 For US history, see Ian Tyrrell, Historians in public: the practice of American history, 1890–1970, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
6 David Thelen, ‘Of audiences, borderlands, and comparisons: toward the internationalization of American history’, Journal of American History, 79, 2, 1992, p. 433.
7 Ibid., p. 451.
8 Ibid., p. 453.
9 David Thelen, ‘The nation and beyond: transnational perspectives on United States history’, Journal of American History, 86, 3, 1999, pp. 965–75 (introduction to a special issue of the same name).
10 Bender, Thomas, New York intellect: a history of intellectual life in New York City, from 1750 to the beginnings of our own time, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988Google Scholar; Randolph Bourne, ‘Trans-national America’, Atlantic Monthly, 118, July 1916, pp. 86–97.
11 Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American history in a global age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
12 ‘Internationalizing the study of American history: a joint project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University: report on planning conference, Villa La Pietra, New York University in Florence, Italy July 6–9, 1997’, http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/report1.html (consulted 25 June 2009); Tyrrell, ‘American exceptionalism’, pp. 1031–55; Raymond Grew, ‘The comparative weakness of American history’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 16, 1, 1985, pp. 87–101.
13 George M. Fredrickson, ‘From exceptionalism to variability: recent developments in cross-national comparative history’, Journal of American History, 82, 2, 1995, p. 590.
14 ‘Internationalizing the study of American history: a joint project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University. report on conference III, Villa La Pietra, New York University in Florence, Italy, July 5–8, 1999’, http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/report3.html (consulted 25 June 2009).
15 Micol Seigel, ‘Beyond compare: comparative method after the transnational turn’, Radical History Review, 91, Winter 2005, pp. 63, 78 (first quote).
16 Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and beyond’, History and Theory, 42, 1, 2003, pp. 39–44.
17 Tyrrell, Ian, Woman's world/woman's empire: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in international perspective, 1880–1930, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991Google Scholar; Tyrrell, Ian, True gardens of the gods: Californian–Australian environmental reform, 1860–1930, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.Google Scholar
18 Marc Bloch, ‘A contribution towards a comparative history of European societies’, in Land and work in mediaeval Europe: selected papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967, p. 47.
19 Michael Kazin, ‘The vogue of transnational history’, Raritan, 26, 3, 2007, p. 167.
20 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Peer Vries, ‘Editorial’, Journal of Global History, 1, 1, 2006, p. 2.
21 Thomas Bender, The La Pietra report: a report to the profession, http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/index.html (consulted 12 July 2008). For a parallel criticism of globalization, see Frederick Cooper, ‘What is the concept of globalization good for? An African historian's perspective’, African Affairs, 100, 2001, pp. 189–213.
22 Akira Iriye, ‘The internationalization of history’, American Historical Review, 94, 1, 1989, pp. 1–10.
23 For example, see Hoganson, Kristin, Consumers’ imperium: the global production of American domesticity, 1865–1920, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.Google Scholar
24 Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 222–5Google Scholar.
25 Gould, ‘Entangled histories’, p. 786; Werner and Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison’, pp. 30–50; ‘AHR forum: entangled empires’.
26 For borderland studies, see Samuel Truett and E. Young, eds., Continental crossroads: remapping U.S.–Mexico borderlands history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. For a critique of transnational history and the promotion of a ‘trans-border’ alternative, see Joseph E. Taylor III, ‘Boundary terminology’, Environmental History, 13, 3, 2008, pp. 454–81.
27 Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘Reflections on transnational history’, 2006, in http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/Trans/forum_trans_index.htm (consulted 4 June 2008).
28 ‘Internationalizing the study of American history: a joint project of the Organization of American Historians and New York University: report on conference II’, http://www.oah.org/activities/lapietra/report2.html (consulted 1 September 2008).
29 Gould, ‘Entangled histories’; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories: notes toward a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3, 1997, pp. 735–62.
30 Jarausch, ‘Reflections’; Ian Tyrrell, ‘Making nations/making states: American historians in the context of empire’, Journal of American History, 86, 3, 1999, pp. 1015–44.
31 Jarausch, ‘Reflections’.
32 Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006.
33 Patel, ‘“Transnations” among “transnations”?’, passim.
34 Lawrence Veysey, ‘The autonomy of American history reconsidered’, American Quarterly, 31, 4, 1979, pp. 455–77.
35 Carl N. Degler, ‘Remaking American history’, Journal of American History, 67, 1, 1980, p. 16.
36 Davies II, Edward J., The United States in world history, New York: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
37 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Three New Deals: reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933–1939, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.Google Scholar
38 Sutter, Paul, Driven wild: how the fight against automobiles launched the modern wilderness movement, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002, pp. 96, 318Google Scholar.
39 Richard White, ‘The nationalization of nature’, Journal of American History, 86, 3, 1999, pp. 1015–44.
40 Alan Dawley, ‘Preface’, Class and community: the industrial revolution in Lynn, 25th anniversary edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. xxv; see also Gyory, Andrew, Closing the gate: race, politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.Google Scholar
41 Jung, Moon-Hu, Coolies and cane: race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
42 Andrews, Thomas G., Killing for coal: America's deadliest labor war, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 291Google Scholar.
43 Coleman, Peter J., Progressivism and the world of reform: New Zealand and the origins of the American welfare state, Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1987Google Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic crossings: social politics in a progressive age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998Google Scholar; Ian Tyrrell, ‘Transatlantic progressivism in women's temperance and suffrage’, in David Gutzke, ed., Britain and transnational progressivism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 134–48.
44 Gutzke, Britain and transnational progressivism; Coleman, Progressivism; Ian Tyrrell, ‘Looking eastward: Pacific and global perspectives on American history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, Japanese Journal of American Studies, 18, 2007, pp. 41–57. For environmental history, the seminal text in regard to reciprocity is Alfred W. Crosby Jr, The Columbian exchange: biological and cultural consequences of 1492, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972.
45 Examples include de Grazia, Victoria, Irresistible empire: America's advance through twentieth-century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005Google Scholar; R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., The American century in Europe, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003; Philip Bell and Roger Bell, eds., Americanization and Australia, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998; Rob Kroes and Rydell, Robert, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
46 Grimshaw, Patricia, Paths of duty: American missionary wives in nineteenth-century Hawaii, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989Google Scholar; Bullock, Mary Brown, An American transplant: the Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.Google Scholar
47 On ‘Williams School’ foreign policy studies of this type, see Buhle, Paul M. and Rice-Maximin, Edward, William Appleman Williams: the tragedy of empire, New York: Routledge, 1995Google Scholar; Williams, William Appleman, Empire as a way of life, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980Google Scholar. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American dream: American economic and cultural expansion, 1890–1945, New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
48 Tyrrell, Ian, Transnational nation: United States history in global perspective since 1789, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, ch. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Scully, Eileen P., Bargaining with the state from afar: American citizenship in treaty port China, 1844–1942, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for American expatriates, there is no satisfactory single study, but see Maureen Montgomery, ‘Gilded prostitution’: money, migration and marriage, 1870–1914, London: Routledge, 1989.
50 Wilkins, Mira, The emergence of multinational enterprise: American business abroad from the colonial era to 1914, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
51 Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and empire: reconstructing the worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the American Civil War’, American Historical Review, 109, 5, 2004, pp. 1405–38. See also Peter A. Coclanis, ‘Distant thunder: the creation of a world market in rice and the transformations it wrought’, American Historical Review, 98, 4, 1993, pp. 1050–78.
52 For a synthesis, see Tucker, Richard, Insatiable appetite: the United States and the ecological degradation of the tropical world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
53 Samuel Truett, Fugitive landscapes: the forgotten history of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 56.
54 Walter LaFeber, ‘The United States and Europe in an age of American unilateralism’, in Moore and Vaudagna, American Century, pp. 26, 45 (quote); for an example of the United States as global space, see LaFeber, Walter, Michael Jordan and the new global capitalism, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999Google Scholar.
55 See the essays in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by empire: geographies of intimacy in North American history, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper, ‘Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda’, in Ann Laura Stoler and Frederic Cooper, eds., Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997, p. 15.
56 Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of U. S. imperialism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; Kaplan, Amy, The anarchy of empire in the making of U.S. culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002Google Scholar; Kramer, Paul A., The blood of government: race, empire, the United States, and the Philippines, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006Google Scholar; Renda, Mary A., Taking Haiti: military occupation and the culture of U.S. imperialism, 1915–1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001Google Scholar; Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano, eds., Colonial crucible: empire in the making of the modern American state, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
57 Keck, Margaret and Sikkink, Kathryn, Activists beyond borders: advocacy networks in international politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998Google Scholar; Richard Price, ‘Transnational civil society and advocacy in world politics’, World Politics, 55, 4, 2003, pp. 579–606; Tarrow, Sidney, The new transnational activism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Castells, Manuel, The rise of the network society, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.Google Scholar
58 Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the global colour line: white men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
59 Huttenback, Robert A., Racism and empire: white settlers and colored immigrants in the British self-governing colonies, 1830–1910, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
60 Charles Maier, ‘Discussion on transnational history’, 2006, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-german&month=0601&week=d&msg=fz4or79bUjZXO9rM/LT0ZQ&user=&pw (consulted 30 June 2008).
61 Headrick, Daniel R., The invisible weapon: telecommunications and international politics, 1851–1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991Google Scholar; Headrick, The tools of empire: technology and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
62 Tyrrell, Transnational nation, ch. 10; see the important but neglected work, Curti, Merle, American philanthropy abroad, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963Google Scholar; cf. Richard Hofstadter, ‘Cuba, the Philippines, and manifest destiny’, in The paranoid style in American politics and other essays, New York: Knopf, 1965, pp. 145–87.
63 Manela, Wilsonian moment; Lauren, Paul Gordon, The evolution of international human rights: visions seen, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003Google Scholar. Major American work has focused on abolitionism, for which see, for example, Davis, David Brion, Slavery and human progress, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.Google ScholarBorgwardt, Elizabeth, A New Deal for the world: America's vision for human rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, focuses on the export of an American ideaCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
64 Hodes, Martha, The sea captain's wife: a true story of love, race, and war in the nineteenth century, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.Google Scholar
65 For example, Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The many-headed hydra: the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic, Boston, MA: Beacon, 2000.Google Scholar
66 Madeleine Herren, ‘Governmental internationalism and the beginning of a new world order in the late nineteenth century’, in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The mechanics of internationalism: culture, society, and politics from the 1840s to the first world war, London and Oxford: German Historical Institute and Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 121–44.
67 Corbould, Clare, Becoming African Americans: black public life in Harlem, 1919–1939, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 161–2, 209–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Tyrrell, Woman's world, chs. 4–6; Rupp, Leila, Worlds of women: the making of an international women's movement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997Google Scholar; on public space, see Habermas, Jürgen, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.Google Scholar
69 Faist, Thomas, The volume and dynamics of international migration and transnational social spaces, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
70 Ryan Dunch, ‘Beyond cultural imperialism: cultural theory, Christian missions, and global modernity’, History and Theory, 41, 3, 2002, p. 320.
71 Mary and Margaret Leitch, Seven years in Ceylon: stories of mission life, New York: American Tract Society, 1890.
72 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, R. 456, Mary and Margaret W. Leitch to ‘Mrs Smith’ (née Emily Maria Fairbank, of Tillypally, Ceylon), 19 April 1890 (underlining in original).
73 Ibid., Margaret W. Leitch to N. G. Clark, 3 April 1882.
74 Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, ‘Introduction: the mechanics of internationalism’, in Geyer and Paulmann, Mechanics, pp. 22–3.
75 Ibid.; Herren, ‘Governmental internationalism’, pp. 121–44; ‘A3 The real fiction of unreal equality: networking the international system’, University of Heidelberg Research Clusters, 2009, http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/research/areas/a/projects (consulted 16 April 2009).
76 On ‘humanitarianism’, see Gil Gott, ‘Imperial humanitarianism: history of an arrested dialectic’, in Berta Esperanza Hernandez-Truyol, ed., Moral imperialism: a critical anthology, New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 19–39.
77 Curti, American philanthropy; Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold's ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998Google Scholar; Lauren, Evolution, ch. 2.
78 For a general view of diaspora studies, see Ember, Ember, and Skoggard, eds., Encyclopedia of diasporas.
79 For much earlier studies, see Harold Marraro, ‘Garibaldi in New York’, New York History, 27, April 1946, pp. 182–4; Lawrence J. McCaffrey, ed., Irish nationalism and the American contribution, New York: Arno Press, 1976. For a recent study, see Doorley, Michael, Irish-American diaspora nationalism: the Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916–1935, Portland, OR: Four Courts, 2005Google Scholar. Among US historians, Donna Gabaccia has led the way in developing transnational interpretation of Italian diasporas: see, for example, Gabaccia, Italy's many diasporas, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000.
80 Corbould, Becoming African Americans, pp. 161–2, 209–13. Among numerous other works, see Owens, Irma Watkins, Blood relations: Caribbean immigrants and the Harlem community, 1900–1930, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996Google Scholar; Gaines, Kevin, American Africans in Ghana: black expatriates in the civil rights era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 29, 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James, Winston, Holding aloft the banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth-century America, London: Verso, 1998Google Scholar; Stein, Judith, The world of Marcus Garvey: race and class in modern society, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
81 Pierre-Yves Saunier profile, 2007, http://www.h-net.org/people/editors/show.cgi?ID=124605 (consulted 24 September 2008); Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, eds., Another global city: historical explorations into the transnational municipal moment, 1850–2000, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
82 Saunier, ‘Learning by doing’, pp. 173–4; see also Maier, ‘Discussion.’
83 White, ‘Nationalization of nature’.
84 Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of transnational history, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Saunier, ‘Learning by doing’, p. 14.
85 Saunier, ‘Learning by doing’, p. 169.
86 See, for example, Mary Beth Norton et al., A people and a nation, 7th edition, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005; Brinkley, Alan W., American history: a survey, 11th edition, Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2003.Google Scholar
87 Bender, Thomas, A nation among nations: America's place in world history, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.Google Scholar
88 Rauchway, Eric, Blessed among nations: how the world made America, New York: Hill and Wang, 2006Google Scholar. For a more balanced view that emphasizes comparisons as well as transnational aspects, see Guarneri, Carl J., America in the world: United States history in global context, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.Google Scholar