Introduction

THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN
Borrowing the title of Simon Winchester’s novel as the title of this introduction is quite appropriate. Not so much because it would approximately describe the division of roles between the two general editors. Or because this was the very volume that one of us randomly pulled out from the other’s bookshelves at the time we tuned the first sketches of this volume. Rather, it is because we want to stress from the start that the making of this volume was not as difficult as the making of the Oxford English Dictionary at the end of the 19^th century. James Murray had to face many obstacles we have been spared. Making a dictionary is probably easier today than it was just thirty years ago, and a major reason lies in the development of information technologies. We sometimes had an attack of vertigo when we thought about the energy and time that one had to spend during the postal age to invent entries, find contributors, follow up with hundreds of authors and liaise with an editing and publishing team. When we think of how web searches have been complementary to library work when establishing a list of entries or a list of possible contributors, and when we browse the 15,000 e-mails or so that have been generated just by the two of us during the development of this project, we realize how the ability to communicate quickly and cheaply with colleagues from across the globe has been crucial in shaping this endeavour. We also believe that it was an incentive to stretch our editorial suggestions. While you certainly hesitate to send a fourth manuscript or typed letter with editorial comments about a couple of sentences when it takes several weeks to travel back and forth, you do not hesitate to send an e-mail that asks for clarification about a single word or a comma. While you’d tire of chasing an overdue entry by phone at great expense, you now have the ability to swoop down on contributors using Voice over IP software. Somehow, this also makes the standards higher, and we hope to have lived up at least partially to the new claims that are laid on us academics by the possibilities of digital communication.

The use of these possibilities was part of the excitement and pleasure we had in developing this project. But there was something else, where we quite likely touched upon some of James Murray’s and other encyclopedia makers’ feelings when they worked out their projects. We were starting from scratch without a matrix, without a precedent. There were no ‘obvious’ entries or contributors that we had to enlist or do without, because of their presence in a previous attempt to do what we were doing. It was definitely not like working on just another edition in a long line of reference volumes on the history of one or another country, or any spin-off from a long series of formatted companions and dictionaries. This provided us with freedom and room for manoeuvre, invaluable possessions if you want to keep a high and even level of commitment and stamina during several years.

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This does not mean that we considered we were inventing anything. In the world of knowledge, such a stance is bound to be exposed as a boast at one moment or another. Instead, as historians of the modern age, we simply faced the fact that more and more people were paying attention to the circulations and connections between, above and beyond national polities and societies, from the 19th century to current times. While the history of the modern age had been, more than that of other periods in human history, written from a national perspective, the last twenty years have witnessed the mounting of an explicit challenge to this position, originating from the whole spectrum of the social sciences and the humanities. It was manifest in the growing number of forums, meetings, journals, courses and research projects which addressed the modern world by considering the entangled nature of the different national and local histories.

We saw this trend developing and were ourselves part of it in our fields and specialties. It had many labels, and more have developed since. Some distinguished historians such as Patrick Manning, Jerry Bentley, Chris Bayly and Anthony Hopkins prefer ‘world history’ to name their concern for cross-cultural and global comparisons and connections. Similarly, a number of people consider that ‘international history’ is an appropriate way to designate their interest. At the other end of the spectrum, other scholars have coined new terms: Sanjay Subrahmanyam uses the term ‘connected histories’, Shalini Randeria goes for ‘entangled history’, Michael Werner and Benedicte Zimmerman have sketched what an ‘histoire croisée’ would be, David Thelen and his US colleagues have popularized the term ‘transnational history’ with prompt support from Jürgen Kocka and a host of German colleagues, Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye have defended the idea of a ‘new global history’, while ‘shared histories’ has taken its cue from people studying the connections between the history of separate ethnic groups. More recently, William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Kenneth Pomeranz and Peer Vries have chosen ‘global history’ to name the new journal they have been co-editing since 2006. We would not spend a minute disputing the advantages and limits of these and other labels, for we feel those who use them share a similar interest in what moves between and across different polities and societies. Because of our idiosyncrasies, we just felt that ‘transnational history’ gave the most faithful indication of what we were trying to do. We are interested in links and flows, and want to track people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or in-between polities and societies. Among the units that were thus crossed, consolidated or subverted in the modern age, first and foremost were the national ones, if only because our work addresses the moment, roughly from the middle of the 19th century until nowadays, when nations came to be seen and empowered as the main frames for the political, cultural, economic and social life of human beings.

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Both in our research and in our classroom activities, we had the feeling that there did not exist a kind of reference volume that would provide facts and leads as to the shape, content, role and impact of these transnational circulations and connections. This was not available from the existing reference volumes, we thought. The flows of people, goods, ideas or processes that stretched over borders were sidelined or altogether neglected by national dictionaries. Area studies reference volumes also limited their perspective to the area that was studied. World history encyclopedias were mostly organized by national or regional categories, and focused on civilizations while rarely dealing with the relationship among contexts. The time range of world history is so large, from the Big Bang onwards, that the age of nations is just a very brief and recent moment seen from this point of view. Some biographical dictionaries had a wide range but were strictly limited to biographical entries, while the most relevant thematic reference volumes were of course limited by their thematic orientation. Our earliest sketches, and discussion of them with colleagues strengthened our idea that there was room and need for a reference volume that would document the history of connections and circulations in the modern age, from about 1850 to the present.

It was very clear to us from the start that such a project had to be developed by a group of scholars who would share some common dispositions. Discipline or subdiscipline were not discriminating factors, as long as a potential author had a bent for grappling with time and the history of the last 160 years. We sought contributors not only in the discipline of history but also all around the social sciences and humanities rim, from anthropology to economics, theology, linguistics, geography or sociology and the whole range of interdisciplinary studies. But we also imagined that, if the Dictionary was to effectively address connections and circulations across polities and societies, it had to be edited and written by people who would be ‘transnational’ themselves, with regard to their linguistic abilities, their interests and connections with worldwide communities of researchers in their fields, their command of existing literature and, according to our hunch, their personal trajectories. This basic position has found its expression in the list of associate editors and of contributors. However, we were not in search of any politically correct balance of gender, race, ethnicity, countries or continents, and we certainly do not purport to have eliminated biases that are connected to ‘wherefrom we write’. Conditions of personal availability, documentation facilities, visibility and command of the English language have also informed our search for contributors and the response of those we have approached. The inequalities of resources throughout the academic world have thus left their mark on this volume, because there are certainly some bright scholars we left aside because we simply did not know them, or because we felt it would be difficult for them to assemble the material from which to write wide-ranging pieces. Last but not least, we were also the complacent victims of our own networks and locations: there is no doubt that the list of contributors, the headword list and the content of the entries would have been different if this Dictionary had been edited, say, by a Latin American historian born/living in China and a Middle Eastern scholar with some experience in Indian universities. We are the first to believe that our historical imagination needs to be enlarged to be able to write transnational history transnationally and we are just looking forward to another such dictionary or encyclopedia, or to a new edition of this one, to add other approaches to our own current attempts. We are pretty sure this will come quite soon as we consider the ongoing development of research and teaching endeavours that endorse a transnational perspective.

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Indeed, it may be one of the most salient features of this specific volume that it emerges from a work in progress. Dictionaries and encyclopedias more usually pertain to well established disciplines, and claim to provide an ultimate state-of-the-art survey, whereas many of the entries written for this volume are exploratory to the point that we were tempted to name it the Tentative Dictionary of Transnational History. Inventing the list of entries, identifying possible contributors, was an exciting and difficult task for which we had no previous model or matrix. Accordingly, we established our list of headwords in an attempt to cover the widest possible range of themes for this first foray, leaving comprehensiveness’s dreams to lie dormant for a while. We are aware of the gaps that others may recognize in this list: some have been caused by the lack of imagination, curiosity and expertise on our part, and others by the excess of the same at the moment when we trimmed our original list of 1,500 possible entries to establish the framework for a workable volume. We take the blame for both, and consider these flaws an incentive for future endeavours.

The unprecedented nature of this project is also reflected in the contents of the entries themselves. Some subjects may be riper than others, and the content is more ‘state of the art’. Other entries are venturing onto new ground, blazing trails that had not been explored as such: they are full of hunches, questions, possibilities, and they focus on the moments and places that are more familiar to their authors. Some other contributors chose the well rounded way, and came up with a piece that will satisfy readers in search of data, facts and figures. Last but not least, while most of the contributors have focused their attention on the development of historical processes, another group have ventured onto more theoretical ground and coped with concepts that have been used to understand such processes, to assess how they have been shaped, appropriated and disputed across borders.

It has not been uncommon for entries to eventually take a direction that was not foreseen, and this has always been a pleasure for us as editors. In all these instances, the contributors to this Dictionary have been aware that they were just having a first try, and generously offered their insight with the bitter awareness that they could not harness the breadth of literature in various languages and from many disciplinary or subdisciplinary landscapes. Their willingness to expose the range and limits of their expertise has been very generous.

Because of all these limits, this volume is not intended to be canonical. There is no disciplinary brief included in its text, subtext or paratext. We think it is a tool that will be used by scholars to develop their own projects to study other circulations and connections, and to revise or update what has been written in this Dictionary about some of these. It is a step, a prop for further research to develop. On the other hand, we do not want to establish a new field or a new subdiscipline, and it is just for the sake of clarity that we have adopted the name of The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. We believe the transnational approach to be an angle, a perspective that can be adopted by everyone who wants to address the entangled condition of the modern world and contribute answers to some very specific questions. To summarize, there are three prongs that this volume wants to contribute to. First, the historicization of interdependency and interconnection phenomena between national, regional or cultural spheres in the modern age, by charting the development of projects, designs and structures that have organized circulations and connections through and between them, in an uneven and non-linear way. Second, the advancement of knowledge on neglected or hazy regions of national and other self-contained territorial histories, by acknowledging foreign contributions to the design, discussion and implementation of patterns that are often seen as owing their features to domestic conditions. Third, the understanding of trends and protagonists that are often left on the periphery of national or comparative frameworks; and this leads us to the study of markets, trajectories, concepts, activities and organizations that thrived in-between and across the nations: international voluntary associations, loose Transnational ideas networks, diasporas or commodities. Readers and users will be able to tell if this volume delivers on these fronts and on others. But for us, as editors, the contributors to The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History have made our historical education more complete on all these frontiers. This volume is theirs.
AKIRA IRIYE
PIERRE-YVES SAUNIER

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