Global and Transnational History

The Past, Present, and Future

A. Iriye

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137299833
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It is no exaggeration to say that the study of history has been transformed significantly during the last twenty-odd years. Akira Iriye, the world authority on transnational history, examines the emergence and growth of global and transnational history, away from more traditional, nation-centred perspectives.

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The Rise of Global and Transnational History

Abstract: This chapter outlines the “historiographic revolution” since the 1990s, with a focus on the rise of global history and transnational history. Prior to the late 1980s and the early 1990s, historical writings had been presented primarily in the framework of nations or regions: American history, European history, and the like. During the last 20 years or so, a more global approach has become influential, along with a stress on transnational actors (e.g. races, non-state organizations) and themes (e.g. migrations, human rights). I pay particular attention to international history, traditionally conceptualized as a study of interrelationships among states, which has been increasingly put in the context of, or in juxtaposition with, transnational history.

Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833.

There has been a sea change in the way historians understand, teach, and write history during the last 25 years or so. This may be more a personal observation of a historian who has been reading and writing on subjects and themes in modern history, focusing on international affairs, than a widely applicable generalization. But all historians, like scholars of other disciplines, have an obligation to relate their work to that of those who have preceded them and to locate themselves in the past, present, and possible future of their fields. As someone who has been studying history since the 1950s, I feel I have personally witnessed and been involved in some of the historiographic changes during the last six decades.

The recent historiographic transformation is evident in the frequency with which words like “global” and “transnational” have come to be used as part of titles of books and articles. Prior to the 1990s, few historical publications, if any, had made use of such adjectives, whereas they have since become common place. Such a phenomenon seems to reflect a significant new development in the way in which historians conceptualize and seek to understand the past, especially in the modern period.

Modern history till recently used to be studied in terms of the nation-state as the key framework of analysis. The scholarly discipline of history, after all, began in nineteenth-century Europe, when the nation-state emerged as the key unit of human activities, political, economic, social, and at times even cultural. History was a study of how a nation emerged and developed. Political, constitutional, and legal issues were examined in close detail, but at the same time, people’s lives, activities, and dreams were considered a vital part of the national past for, as Hegel asserted, there was no such thing as history apart from national consciousness. Such an approach to history spread to countries and people outside the West as they, too, developed as modern states and engaged in nation-building tasks.

As an undergraduate (at Haverford College, Pennsylvania), I concentrated on British history, studying in close detail the constitutional developments under the Tudors and Stuarts and writing a senior thesis on the Anglican clergy in eighteenth-century England. In retrospect this was essential training for a would-be historian. I learned such basics as the reading of primary sources, the review of the scholarly literature, and the writing of a monograph that might potentially be considered for publication. Above all, my principal teacher (Wallace MacCaffrey) taught me and my fellow students that the study of British (or, by extension, any country’s) history was an open book regardless of one’s personal background. There were methodologies and generalizations available to all students and applicable to all countries. This was particularly encouraging advice to a foreign student like me, whose command of the English language was less than satisfactory. Having thus been initiated into the world of history study, I went on to graduate school, at Harvard University, where I was trained to become a professional historian. My field of specialization switched from British history to US history as well as to modern Chinese history, but there was no significant change in methodology or approach in the transition. History, in particular modern history that my fellow graduate students and I studied, still consisted of national histories. In each national history, themes like political unification, constitutional and legal developments, economic modernization, and cultural pursuits (including religion, education, and popular entertainment) were subjects of research, writing, and teaching, all pointing to the emergence of the nation as it came to exist at a given moment in time as well as to its subsequent development. Such a perspective may be termed nation-centrism, or the nation-centered understanding of modern history. Inevitably, the nation-centered historical study tended to accentuate the uniqueness of each country’s experiences, ideas, and institutions. A country’s past was a precious heritage passed on from generation to generation and constituted the shared memory of all its citizens. The historian’s task in such a context, we learned, appeared to consist of exploring that heritage in all its nuances and then to pass it on to readers. “Exceptionalism” was thus a tendency that frequently characterized the way any nation’s past was studied and understood.

Of course, as would-be scholars of history, we learned that a rich historiographic tradition existed so that one generation of historians would not just repeat what their predecessors had accomplished. A professional historian’s task was to make an “original contribution” to the scholarly literature, such as adding new data, a fresh methodology, or even a controversial perspective on a country’s past.

For those of our generation who were trained as historians during the 1950s and the early 1960s, several fascinating shifts would occur in the study of the past, albeit still within the larger framework of national history. In the case of Chinese history, for instance, for a long time the country’s “response” (or lack of response) to the West was a standard framework for understanding its modern experience, but then some scholars began to emphasize China’s indigenous ideas and institutions that had prepared it for its modern nationhood. The focus on the nation as the unit of analysis remained, however. In US history, political developments interested most professional historians till the 1960s when a “social turn” emerged, with scholars emphasizing the need to pay closer attention than in the past to women, racial minorities, and others who had not been the primary actors in the political drama. Social historians were eager to bring these outsiders into their study of the American past. Women’s history, African-American history, ethnic history, and the like were among the most interesting subfields of history in the last decades of the twentieth century. Rather than focusing on the “establishment,” the new turn sought to incorporate the disenfranchised, the minorities, and the marginalized as authentic actors in the reconceptualized history of the American nation. This was still nation-centered history, but with a greater emphasis on the country’s social groups and local scenes than on national politics. But the “social turn,” if anything, accentuated the exceptionalist interpretation of the nation’s past. For, to the extent that social history encouraged scholars and students to examine the nation’s history “from the bottom up,” as it was said, minute details and local developments came to claim their attention as much as, or even more than, broader themes and larger questions. The attention paid to local history was an important corrective to nation-centered generalizations, but it could also keep the historian’s attention narrowly focused. If the larger national picture was sometimes lost sight of, even more so were other countries, not to mention the whole world. Without some examination and knowledge of concurrent developments elsewhere, it was easy to dwell on the local scene and emphasize its uniqueness. Cultural studies that gained influence simultaneously with social history may have accentuated this tendency through its emphasis on the text, i.e. the authenticity of the spoken or written word grounded on each individual circumstance. It was very difficult to generalize about written texts or works of art because circumstances of their creation were all different. At the same time, the “cultural turn” often implied a shift away from the study of elites (in the history of art, of literature, of music, and the like) toward a concern with mass consumption and popular culture. These phenomena, too, were seen as unique, both to the local scene and to the nation at large, reflective of national habits of mind, or “mentalities.”

Needless to say, neither in their research nor in teaching, could historians just deal with one country and entirely ignore other countries or the wider world. A small number of scholars compared such phenomena as feudalism and nationalism across national boundaries. This was what came to be called comparative history. However, unlike comparative literature that grew in a very short period of time (mostly in the second half of the twentieth century) into a major field, often with its own separate department, comparative history was not practiced widely and often consisted of scholars of different nations’ histories comparing their notes, so that their nation-centrism remained. It was primarily in the framework of a country’s foreign relations, or diplomatic history, a genre that had its venerable beginning in the nineteenth century and persisted through most decades of the twentieth, that historians were obliged to familiarize themselves at least with the decision-making processes of a plurality of sovereign states. This was a field of history that examined how nations dealt with one another through diplomacy, trade, and at times through military conflict. Foreign policy was the key framework of study; each nation had its own definition of national interest, which it sought to maximize by utilizing all means, through peaceful diplomacy if possible but through military force if necessary. Since no pair of nations shared identical interests, there was always a potential conflict between them, which they sought to reconcile through treaties and agreements. When they failed to do so, war could result, and when it ended, the new circumstance compelled the belligerent nations to redefine their interests, sometimes leading to the establishment of a postwar arrangement. The process would go on ad infinitum so long as there existed separate nations.

Diplomatic history, the field in which I wrote my dissertation, required that the historian develop some knowledge of the countries whose mutual relations were being examined. That would include multiarchival research and an intimate knowledge of decision-makers in the countries involved. (In my own case, the dissertation dealt with international affairs in the Asia-Pacific region during the 1920s. Subsequently published as a book, After Imperialism, this was essentially a traditional monograph in which interstate policies were examined on the basis of published and personal documents of decision-makers in several countries.¹) The “social turn” in the 1960s and the subsequent decades served to broaden the scope of inquiry, and diplomatic historians began exploring wider circles of people as they affected the decision-making processes: public opinion, party politics, interest groups, and the like. The “cultural turn” encouraged the study of popular images and perceptions: how people looked at other nations, what they thought their country stood for, or how they defined the national interest. Even in such situations, however, the nation remained the key unit of analysis. In the case of US diplomatic history, the framework was American foreign relations, whether “American” meant the decision-makers, public opinion, or both. (It may also be noted that most studies of US foreign relations remained mono-archival, based entirely on English-language sources. Even books and articles on Cold War history tended to be written without reference to Russian, not to mention Chinese and other language material.)

Diplomatic history, or the history of foreign affairs, increasingly came to be called “international history” during the 1970s. The International History Review, established in 1979, became a major organ of the field, together with Diplomatic History, launched by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in 1977. While the founding editors of this latter journal chose to call it “diplomatic history,” the articles it published frequently discarded this traditional phrase for others, including “international history.” (This was a term familiar to British scholars and students, but in the United States and other countries “history of international relations” was more common.) “American foreign relations” probably remained the most widely used expression in college courses dealing with the subject, notably in the United States, and “international history” may initially have meant no more than a sum of the foreign relations of all countries, or at least of the major powers. (I, too, changed the title of the principal courses I taught from “foreign relations” to “international history” in the mid-1980s.) At least, the increasing popularity of “international” as against “diplomatic” history suggested that scholars were becoming interested in going beyond examining how nations devised their policies and strategies toward one another and in conceptualizing some sort of a world order in which they pursued their respected interests.

The field of international history, nevertheless, was still focused on the nation as the key unit of analysis. In terms of the larger world, the “great powers” almost always took center stage. This can best be seen in the fact that major diplomatic and military events continued to determine the chronology of international history. It was virtually universally accepted that the world went from the Napoleonic wars and the consequent “Vienna system” (the European order that was established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815) to the First World War and the “Versailles system,” defined by the victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference, and from there to the Second World War (usually characterized as the breakdown of the Versailles system, although the Asian part of the global conflict entailed the collapse of the “Washington system” that had defined regional affairs during the 1920s). But, as virtually every historian noted, the Second World War somehow led to the US–USSR Cold War, a condition of “neither peace nor war” and maintained by a system of “bipolarity.” This was a chronology defined by interrelations among the great Western powers in which small nations of Europe and virtually all countries and people in other parts of the globe counted for little. William Keylor’s The Twentieth-Century World (1983), a widely used and very helpful survey, followed such a sequence of events, as did Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), arguably the best study in the genre of international history published before the 1990s.² The book offered a systematic analysis of the ways in which the major powers had risen and fallen since the sixteenth century, a history that traced the emergence and eventual decline of the Austrian empire, the Dutch empire, France, Britain, and Germany, until the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two superpowers to determine the fate of the world. Kennedy might have discussed the possibility of the eventual decline, if not the demise, of the Soviet Union, but in the 1980s such a prediction would have seemed premature. In any event, the author concluded by speculating on what great powers in the future might come to challenge the United States: China, Japan, a united Europe, or some other country? The book caught the attention not only of historians but of the public at large, especially those in the United States who were keenly concerned about the their country’s future position in the world. In examining international history through an analysis of the relative military and economic strengths of the great powers, the book typified the nation-centric approach to international history that prevailed at that time.

The study of imperialism that flourished from the 1960s through the 1980s may also be fitted into this general historiographic phenomenon. William Langer’s The Diplomacy of Imperialism (1935) was probably the best example of diplomatic history writing before the Second World War.³ As a multiarchival, extensive study of the imperialistic rivalries from the 1880s through the First World War, it had no equal. And its scope was global, covering Africa, the Middle-East, Asia and the Pacific—but curiously not Latin America. Nevertheless, as the title of the book indicated, Langer was primarily interested ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1  The Rise of Global and Transnational History
• 2  Historians Falling Behind History
• 3  Global/Transnational Historiography
• 4  Where Do We Go From Here?
• Appendix: List of Works Cited