A conversation in need of expansion: the transnational perspective and historical practice

It is among the main purposes of discussion forums to bring different perspectives together and foster exchanges between them. But forums necessarily also assume that there already is some form of preexisting community that can be engaged in a meaningful debate. In that sense, this forum will create a new meeting point for all those scholars whose research or scholarly interests can be at least loosely related to the spectrum of approaches that can be grouped under “transnational history.” 

Without a doubt, transnational history has experienced a spectacular growth, and it has evoked as much attention as it has created academic energy. We can particularly speak of a genuine “transnational turn” in the writing of history if we use a wider definition of this field and refer to it as shorthand for a range of academic pursuits transgressing the national bias that has characterized much of modern academic historiography since its early days in the cradle of the nation state. As an endeavor to explore alternative conceptions of historical space, “transnational history” carries a wide range of meanings and hence cannot be categorically differentiated from other suggested field designations such as trans-local history or global history. 

Thus far, transnational history has arguably produced its most significant results when it not only transgressed borders between adjacent countries but also reached across continental, “cultural” and other boundaries. It is particularly in this context that the transnationalization of historical research carries also a certain danger of perpetuating certain hegemonies of knowledge. Without a doubt, the vast majority of scholars in this field are quite aware of the dangers of privileged perspectives and homogenizing master narratives. In fact, many see the transnational turn as an opportunity to supply our field with a solid ground of detailed research in order to challenge many Eurocentric visions of the past.

But there might be other problem zones in our landscapes of transnational historical research that might be worth reflecting upon in the context of this forum. This is particularly the case with the international imbalances and hierarchies in our field: for example, if one takes a look at the recent English-speaking literature in transnational history, one easily gets the impression that the transnational turn in historiography is by and large an Anglophone phenomenon, flanked by a few satellite discussions in other, usually European, societies. Yet at the same time as in the West, an increasing number of scholars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world have become convinced that much of human history is not best understood by containing historical investigations within particular national or regional visions. In many countries and world regions, new scholarly energy and institutional support has been flowing towards studying history from decentered and border-crossing perspectives. 

Given this situation, it is somewhat ironic that in the West mirrored walls have surrounded most methodological exchanges on transnational history. Some journals have at least published reports about research in other parts of the world. Yet such contributions have hardly inspired, let alone influenced, the spectrum of theories in Europe and the United States. It remains unfortunately true that much of transnational history may be characterized by both, a rising interest in the history of other world regions and at the same time a continued lack of attention to current historical scholarship there. This is especially true if we look at the patterns of academic interaction between Western and non-Western societies as well as between poor and rich countries. Here a strong gap in academic influence and a discrepancy in who can afford to ignore whom, still dominates our daily professional realities.

The global hierarchies of academic knowledge have become so much of our academic reality that they are usually not even problematized. But they profoundly shape the ways in which historians approach their fields of study. For example, whereas historians in Britain or the United States can become leading theorists in their field without even acknowledging the existence of work in other languages, the opposite is not the case. Academics and public intellectuals in most societies outside of the West need to be familiar with the latest research in Europe and America even to gain credibility in their own local academic communities. Furthermore, US scholars can write general research reports and review papers without specifying that they are focusing only on research in Anglophone countries. But a Japanese scholar, for example, could not possibly deliver an alleged “global” overview of his or her field while only citing Japanese literature. Facing such inequalities, we may actually look at the shadows of a Eurocentric past.

In the face of such problematic research landscapes, the debates on the futures and potentials of transnational history cannot just be theoretical and conceptual. They also need to address factors such as the international academic settings underlying our field and, by implication, influencing our own ideas. As scholars experimenting with new conceptual spaces, we need to become critically aware of the mental, institutional, local, and global spaces within which we operate ourselves. We would greatly benefit from contextualizing our own environments by asking the same sets of questions that we as historians would apply to academic networks and professional worlds of the past. These worlds include the sociologies of knowledge, and the multifarious social, political as well as cultural contexts framing our academic endeavors. If we fail to consider these dimensions of our own lived realities, our conceptual debates will only be a pale reflection of what they potentially could be. 

Shedding new lights on ourselves as a professional community, in turn, can inspire a wealth of prolific questions regarding the project of transnational history. In a future world in which everybody is provincial, the West will need to learn to take the debates in other parts of the world absolutely seriously without exoticizing them. On such a basis, we can build more globally cooperative landscapes of research and teaching. These, in turn, are a necessary precondition for the project of transnational history to reach up to its own potentials. The transnationalization of historical thinking, after all, will need to be paralleled by a transnationalization of historical practice. 

Dominic Sachsenmaier’s main current research interests are Chinese and Western

approaches to global history as well as the impact of World War I on political and intellectual cultures in China and other parts of the world. Furthermore he

has published in fields such as 17th-century Sino-Western cultural relations,

overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, and multiple modernities. Among

his most recent publications is “World History as Ecumenical History”,

Journal of World History, 18-4 (2007), p. 465- 490. He is an associate professor in the Department of History at Duke University (United States of America)