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What is transnational history?

Ian Tyrrell

The following is an excerpt from a paper given at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociale,
Paris, in January 2007.

The term is relatively new. Its vogue in the 1990s is closely associated with work in
American history. Transnational history as defined and advocated by David Thelen, Thomas
Bender, and others concerns the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across
national boundaries. It applies to the period since the emergence of nation states as important
phenomena in world history. While this epoch can be dated from the time of the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648, which set out the international law of relations between sovereign states, it is
principally used to described histories of the period since the so-called age of the democratic
revolutions, when the birth of the American nation occurs.
First of all, I want to sketch the history of transnational history, and argue that the efficacy of
the concept has been closely tied to wider developments in politics and society. … Recent
discussion of this issue in the American Historical Review (December 2006 issue) does not consider
the historiographical context of the term’s development, and the historical practice of its
deployment. I approach the subject rom this more reflexive point of view.

*****

In 1992 the Journal of American History devoted a special issue to “internationalizing”

American history. The journal’s editor, Thelen, also organized a special seminar on transnational
approaches at the Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, in 1998, and published the participants’
work as another special issue, “The Nation and Beyond. Transnational Perspectives on United
States History” (Dec., 1999). Meanwhile, the Organization of American Historians had begun,
allied to Thomas Bender and New York University, another project to internationalize American
history. A series of conferences held at La Pietra in Florence, Italy, led to the publication of
Rethinking American History in A Global Age (2002), with contributions by key La Pietra
participants. This book became the standard introduction to the new approach. Though closely
associated with American history, soon work was appearing on many other aspects of transnational
history. Especially important was scholarship on international migration patterns and ethnic
diasporas such as the Chinese.
The new transnational history was related to, but not the same as globalization, world
history, and comparative history. Globalisation is generally rejected because of its links with
modernisation theory, its focus on unidirectional activity, on the homogenisation of the world and so
forth. But it is recognised that global perspective should be part of transnational history.
Transnational history is a broader church that encompasses global history because the US itself was
so clearly from the early national period connected globally, with its traders visiting all major areas
of the world, and with missionaries aspiring to global conversion of the world to Christianity and
other travellers following not long after. Trans-cultural or intercultural relations were possible
competitor terms but practitioners at La Pietra considered these as broader and too vague. The
transnational history concept enabled scholars to recognise the importance of the nation while at the
same time contextualising its growth. Advocates of transnational history generally distinguished
their work from comparative history. Nevertheless, time and time again, they had to make clear that
comparative history could complement transnational approaches, even though these were not
exactly the same thing. One might fruitfully compare the history of two or more countries, it was
argued, but comparative history tended to treat national borders as a given. According to the new
view, one must be aware that what constitutes the spaces, institutions, and traditions of nations has
changed over time. Transnational history aimed to put national developments in context, and to
explain the nation in terms of its cross-national influences.
It was in 1989-1991 that the idea of a self-conscious agenda called transnational history first
came into being, linked to a specific research program. Though closely associated with an article I
wrote in the American Historical Review (1991), the idea had been suggested in a narrower form in
1989 by Akira Iriye who argued for an examination not just of nationalism but of “internationalism”
and suggested the study of an explicitly “transnational cultural history” to complement purely
national developments.
The new movement was the product of both intellectual and political causes. The former
included the desire to synthesise the fragmented scholarship of social history, especially in the area
of diplomatic history, which had lost touch with and had become marginalised by social history.
New approaches in international history sought cultural perspectives on diplomatic inquiry. At the
same time, social historians, particularly those working on reform movements and the history of
women moved beyond the national frame of reference to study the role of non-governmental
organizations and individual reform movements influencing nation-state actions. Another influence
was political and intellectual in a broader sense: the impact of the changing world historical
situation. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of new globalisation led historians to
question the efficacy of nation-states as the framework for analysis.
Though the research project was relatively new, the term “transnational” was an older one in
historical and sociological discourse. It was used in political science, for example, to describe the
activities of multinational corporations and international labour unions in the 1970s. Robert
Keohane and Joseph Nye edited an interesting early example of this genre, Transnational Relations
and World Politics (But this work focused on formal state institutions, did not incorporate the new
social history, and it lacked deeper historical perspectives showing the trajectory of transnational
movements, except in an interesting sketch by Alexander Field in that volume). A slightly older
usage came from the field of law, where the American judge and academic Philip Jessup was using
the term and developing the field of “transnational law” in the 1950s in response to the growth of
new supranational institutions, notably the United Nations agencies. The origins of the term
“transnational” itself can be traced back at least as far as 1916 in a seminal essay in the United
States written by radical intellectual Randolph Bourne, called “Transnational America.” Historians,
however, have treated the term in different ways—since Bourne’s usage was an invitation to
American multiculturalism and in some ways an invocation of American exceptionalism. Historians
have produced a much longer tradition of transnational historical writing than can be identified
either with the current transnational movement or the intellectual agenda of Randolph Bourne.
In a broader sense a good deal of what went under the rubric of Annales scholarship also
consisted of a kind of transnational history though not strictly considered so because it concerns the
cultural history and regional rather than national history in an era when dynastic rule still prevailed.
At the Oslo meeting of the International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1928, Marc Bloch’s
address dealt ostensibly with comparative history, but also hinted at modern transnationalism,
showing how transnational and comparative approaches could be combined. Comparative history
was most likely to lead to fruitful explanations, Bloch stated, when it involved “a parallel study of
societies that are at once neighbouring and contemporary, exercising a constant mutual influence,
exposed through their development to the action of the same broad causes just because they are
close and contemporaneous, and owing their existence in part at least to a common origin.” Where
such conditions exist, differences of substance could be discerned within common patterns, and
hypotheses more readily developed to explain observed differences than in cases that were radically
unalike in the first place. The work of the Annales that developed under Bloch and Febvre’s
leadership pioneered forms of both cross-cultural history and regional history greatly influenced by
geography. The most famous example was that of Fernand Braudel, whose The Mediterranean and
the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949) dealt with geographical, economic and
demographic influences. Within this framework, political influences, specially the role of European
rulers, were the ephemera of history.
Though American historians became alive to Annales in the 1960s and began to think of
transnational history in the 1970s—seen in the work of Laurence Veysey and even use the term by
David Pinkney (supportively for European history) and Carl Degler (critically), it is true that
American historians were remarkably cloistered in failing to connect with work in other disciplines
that developed ideas of transnational analysis. And this remains so, with the development of
transnational perspectives in world history, in sociology and in fields such as Chinese history still
partly corralled from American historians and unmeasured against the American example. One
difference from the work done in other fields of scholarship in those earlier decades was that mostly
this was seed cast upon stony ground. The field of transnational history (and related developments
going on today in sociology and anthropology) has a prospect of transforming scholarship today
precisely because it chimes in with perceived changes in the world economy and social order
associated with globalisation.

……

Transnational is a broader term, but it is less encompassing that either the deterministic and
unidirectional juggernaut of globalisation, or the generalities of the terminology of “trans-border”
which might refer to borders within nation states, including municipalities. The purpose of the
transnational label was in fact more precise: to focus on the relationship between nation and factors
beyond the nation.
It is often said that the nation holds sovereignty and self-identity. Therefore the transnational
dimension is less important or not important at all. Yet it is a complete misconception to measure
off these relationships as factors to be weighed. Looking at external versus internal factors in
American history is a misconception, especially for the nineteenth century when the state was
relatively weak and trade, capital, and labour flowed freely. Even when the nation-state becomes
vital, that itself is produced transnationally. That is, the global context of security, economic
competition, and demographic change means that the boundaries of the nation had to be made. They
don’t exist in isolation. National identities have been defined against other identities, including the
transnational phenomena that impinge upon the nation as it is constructed. This transnational
making of the nation through a variety of borders from immigration controls to health quarantine to
state projects of national memorialisation has occurred decisively only in very recent times—in the
American case, like so many others, from the 1880s to 1940s particularly. Transnational history
denaturalises the nation, and this is a theme applicable to other historiographies than the American
that has given forth this research program.