What to expect from a Dictionary of Transnational History, from a Global Economic History perspective?

For economic historians, the subjects or themes of ‘transnational history’ became more familiar than for those of other academic disciplines, due to the joint-research project of The Global Economic History Network (GEHN) and the launch of a new academic journal, Journal of Global History in 2006.

      I have been one of the members of the GEHN (2003-2006) and started Osaka global history project in September 2003 (http://www.globalhistoryonline.com/). In Osaka we use the term ‘global history’ to refer to a kind of mega-regional history in the context of the formation and development of a capitalist world-economy or the formation of the Modern World-System. An important aspect of global history is the history of the formation of mutual interdependence or interconnectedness among the various regions or areas in the world under the framework of a capitalist world-economy. The key concepts of global history are ‘comparison’ and ‘connection or relationship’.

      The GEHN has been internationally organized by four universities (key organizers): LSE, (Patrick K. O’Brien), University of California, Irvine, (Kenneth Pomeranz), University of Leiden, (Peer Vries now University of Vienna,) and Osaka University (Kaoru Sugihara, the Graduate School of Economics, Osaka and now The Research Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University). It was financially supported by the Leverhulme Trust in the UK ( http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections /economic History/GEHN/Default.htm ). The GEHN programme has been divided into the following five themes of global economic history:

-The Formation, Development and Operation of Regional, National and International Markets (Markets);

-The Geopolitical and Imperial Contexts for Economic Activity (Imperialism and Geopolitics);

-Religious Values, Ideologies, Family Systems, Promoting and Restraining Economic Growth (Cultures);

-Regimes for the Production of Useful and Reliable Knowledge (Science and Technology);

-Convergence and Divergence in Standards of Living (Real Wages).

      The arguments of the GEHN group were strongly influenced by the provocative books and interpretations about the China-centered early modern world-economy, presented by the so-called ‘Californian School’ in economic history, including such scholars as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone and Dennis Flynn. Californian scholars usually emphasize the importance of ‘comparison’ rather than ‘connection or linkages’. They showed us that as recently as 1750, parallel economic developments occurred in Northwest Europe as well as in East Asia, by using inter-regional comparison. In this sense, the GEHN project was mostly concerned with the comparative history of the early-modern world or ‘the long eighteenth-century’.

  From this economic history observation deck, I can state why my expectations are regarding the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History . First of all, this new Dictionary is complementary to the joint works of the GEHN not only chronologically, covering from about 1850 to the present, but also methodologically, documenting the history of connections and circulations, in other words, the relational history. From its entries list, the citation includes a number of useful references for economic historians. If we consider the graphic presentation of entries that bundles its entries in several ‘tree’ diagrams, some of them, such as ‘people flows’, ‘world order and disorder’ and ‘production and trade’, are closely related to the research subjects of economic history in the modern age.   

The first tree-diagram, ‘people flows’, includes entries like ‘diasporas’ and ‘human mobility’, which are one of the more popular research topics in global economic history. The formation of Chinese and Indian diaspora communities were closely related to the British Empire and imperialism, whose studies are also available by the cross-reference in the same category of entries.

Empires and imperialism were historically one part of ‘world orders’, the second group of entries presented by the tree diagrams. In order to create global relational history, economic historians must pay attention to linkages, movements and relationship of several regions or countries within ‘world orders’. Several basic actors of ‘world orders’ are listed in this book, like ‘nation and state’, ‘inter-governmental organizations’ (the League of Nations and the UN), and ‘empires’. However, in addition to these traditional classifications, this volume also includes entries of ‘money’ and ‘standards’ as part of ‘world orders’. Together with ‘financial markets’ and ‘financial centers’, these two entries are essential to understand the current global financial crisis of 2008-09 and to locate it within a long historical perspective. We can also refer to entries of ‘financial diplomacy’ and ‘loans’ to analyze the origins and structure of the current financial crisis.

The entries under the ‘production and trade’ tree are most closely connected to studies of global economic history. ‘Convergence and divergence’ are key-concepts to analyze economic development of countries and regions. The GEHN project has dealt with two different development-path of economic growth between Western Europe (capital-intensive and labor-saving industrialization) and East Asia (labor intensive and capital-saving industrialization), and their convergence in post-World War II East Asia. Nowadays, many Japanese economic historians are doing original researches about historical origins of ‘East Asian Miracle’ or the recent economic rise of East Asia. For Asian countries, the development of cotton textile industries was crucial for their industrialization or ‘modernization’ of economies. This Dictionary offers us systematic entries of these subjects as well, mainly from Western points of view.   

      In summary, economic history is one of the most advanced sub-fields in global history. By utilizing works of the GEHN and by supplementing this Dictionary, we may explore a new global or transnational economic history. A comparison of mega-regions on a Eurasian continental scale, including Europe, South Asia, East Asia and Japan in the ‘long eighteenth century’, is a newly emerging subject for us. We also adopt a relational approach to reveal interconnectedness or linkages, as distinctive features of our project in Osaka. Our efforts to create global history from Asian perspectives started only five years ago. We would like to continue to organize our seminars and workshops in Osaka by inviting more foreign and Japanese scholars in this developing field, and by collaborating with specialists in Asian area studies as well as in maritime and trans-continental history of Asia. In order to accelerate these new trends of global history studies, the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History seems to be a very helpful tool.

Shigeru AKITA is Professor of British Imperial History at, Osaka University, (Japan). He is the author ofIgirisu-teikoku to Ajia Kokusai-Chitsujyo [The British Empire and  International Order of Asia] (2003), and, with Nick White, of  International Order of Asia in the 1930s and 1950s (2009, forthcoming). He is currently working on a Global History Project with his colleagues and will host the First  International Congress of a newly established international association,The Asian Association of  World Historians (AAWH) on 29th-31st May 2009 in Osaka. Registration and Congress details  can be accessed at:  http://www.let.osaka-u.ac.jp/seiyousi/AAWH/congress