History beyond the nation-state

When Matthew Connelly was looking at graduate schools, he knew that his application wouldn't land naturally on any one historian's pile to review. The departments, he said, were made up of “Americanists, Europeanists, and otherists.” Connelly, now an associate professor of history at Columbia University, was none of the above. He wanted to explore ideas related to Algeria's independence from France, but didn't want to be called a scholar only of French colonialism or only of North Africa, and he didn't want to restrict himself to the power of governments and the military. The ideas associated with that revolt don't belong just with one topic, he said Saturday at a session of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

Connelly is a proponent of “transnational” history, a field that is still being defined. Some people have been doing it for a long time, and the name has been used for several years now. But in a sign that it is achieving a critical mass of scholars and putting down roots, the AHA held a session on “doing transnational history” in order to highlight both some of the promising work and the efforts to support scholars who do it.

While some people use “transnational” and “international” and “global” interchangeably, those on the panel Saturday and other leaders in the field tend to view transnational as more than just international or global. The focus on transnational is on movements or ideas or conditions that cross national borders and that are not best examined through the structure of the nation-state. So somebody could do research comparing key events that took place in various countries, doing lots of comparative work about government leaders and their actions, and that would be global or international, but not transnational.

Many of the most significant developments in history — whether in religion, philosophy, the environment, or other aspects of life — happen “irrespective of national identities,” said Akira Iriye, a professor of history at Harvard University. “It's a very exciting moment in the profession to see so many historians moving in this direction.”

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