Primer: Transnational History

Transnational History encompasses all history that transcends the national level. As a field within the discipline of History, it arose out of dissatisfaction with what was called “methodological nationalism”: the assumption in most historical inquiry that the nation-state is the main building block of history. By contrast, advocates of Transnational History argue that even national questions cannot be sufficiently answered by national explanations: states do not exist in isolation, and should therefore not be studied in isolation.

Transnational History can be a fruitful approach for anyone asking questions about the traffic of goods, people, and ideas. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the importance of nation-states grew, so did their reach. The drawing of borders – both national and imperial – and corresponding rise of national regulatory regimes impacted such traffic across the world. However, goods, people, and ideas are notoriously bad at observing national boundaries. The study of how borders are crossed, in what way, and with what consequences, lies at the heart of Transnational History.

Aside from the question of how borders are crossed, the transnational approach can also center the history of processes, political and social movements, and even whole communities or ethnic groups that have remained peripheral to more nation-centric forms of historiography. Especially over the past twenty years, great strides have been made in foregrounding historical subjects that have long remained invisible precisely because they thrived in between, or indeed across, national territories.

However, using the transnational approach for questions such as those listed above also raises issues. For instance, what is the temporal framework of Transnational History? In a way, the term carries the very focus on nation-states that its early proponents were hoping to avoid. Those who follow this interpretation of Transnational History argue that its purview is therefore primarily modern, and that it has limited analytical value for ancient, medieval, or perhaps even for early modern history. The same critique of Transnational has been construed as Eurocentric: what of the regions of the world to which the nation-state was exported, sometimes by force, in the wake of colonialism? What of the regions in which the nation-state was not a relevant political unit until the mid-twentieth century? This has led some historians to prefer the term translocal over transnational. Middle Eastern historian Ulrike Freitag was an early advocate of this alternative. However, other practitioners take a much wider perspective and argue that the transnational approach encompasses entanglements between and across all forms of natio (place or community of birth), not necessarily in the shape of the nation-state as it the became dominant unit in the nineteenth century. In the latter definition, Transnational History bears a strong family resemblance to Connected History as proposed by Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

It is likewise possible to query the focus on border crossing. In taking mobility seriously as one of the driving forces of history, does the term Transnational History not end up reifying the very borders it proposes to unsettle? Does the “trans” in Transnational History mark border crossing as exceptional where it should be the norm? For much of history, itinerant individuals and even communities were hardly aware they were crossing borders even as they were doing so. Alternatively, as Pekka Hämäläinen argues in Comanche Empire, sovereignty was imagined as well as enacted in ways other than the territorial nation-state well into the modern era. Nevertheless, as proponents of Transnational History argue, territorialized units do impact the local, the regional, and the world, as well as contact between polities and societies. Borders matter, even porous ones.

Among the historical approaches orbiting the larger field of World history, Transnational History is a relative newcomer. Not unlike Connected History, it emerged as a clearly identifiable approach only in the late 1990s. It is no coincidence that Transnational History, which questions the nation-state as the primary unit of history, came up during this time. It reflects a rise in the number and importance of transnational and non-state actors globally from the 1990s onwards, and the questions this raises for the current international system. Law, political science, sociology, and other academic disciplines, have all seen similar orientations towards transnational questions and explanations during this period. Nevertheless, as Antoinette Burton argues in After the Imperial Turn, obituaries of the nation are, so far, premature. A consensus on what Transnational History does and does not include is still developing. What it offers as an approach, however, is a deeper understanding of historical contacts between polities as well as societies.

For further reading:
Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Carolien Stolte is an Assistant Professor of History at the Institute for History, Leiden University (Netherlands). Her research focuses on South Asia in World History, on which she has published widely in journals such as the Journal of Global History, Modern Asian Studies, and Comparative Studies in Society and History. She is currently interested in India’s role in the Afro-Asian movement during decolonization and co-directs a project on Afro-Asian Networks in the early Cold War with Su Lin Lewis of Bristol University. Stolte is editor-in-chief of the World History journal Itinerario as well as editor of the Leiden University Press book series Global Connections. From 2012-2014 she coordinated the Cosmopolis Project. She was a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (2014-2015) and currently serves as a member of the Executive Council of the World History Association (2016-2019).