Reflections on the transnational and comparative imperial history of Asia

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C Perdue
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
National History ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of

Two prominent approaches to the history of empires and nation-states are comparative imperial history [CIH] and transnational history [TNH]. Each group of historians has actively promoted their perspective, but the two have had little interaction. Furthermore, in the history of East Asia, nationalist perspectives have dominated over transnational approaches until very recent times. This article points to new studies that examine Chinese imperial and national history from transnational and comparative perspectives, and encourages further work, including an ecological and environmental viewpoint, that will foster this trend.

POCOCK AND THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE NEW BRITISH HISTORY

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD BOURKE
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
National History ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Comparative Study

ABSTRACTThis article recovers the rationale behind the project to found a ‘new’ British history undertaken by J. G. A. Pocock in the early 1970s, and contrasts this with the approach adopted in the subsequent historiography. The article argues that British history as conceived by Pocock was intended to transcend the parochialism of national history whilst also rehabilitating the writing of imperial history without succumbing to the temptations of metropolitan whiggism. Pocock's perspective was constructed against the backdrop of a British withdrawal from empire and led him to a neo-Seeleyan interest in the dynamics of imperial expansion and retrenchment. While this process is best understood through the comparative study of empires, any such undertaking raises complex questions about the ultimate subject of historical inquiry and the nature of historical explanation. In addressing these questions, this article distinguishes the ambition to write the history of a polity from the aim of writing histories of ‘party’ as originally formulated by the historians of the Scottish enlightenment whose work has been among Pocock's abiding subjects of investigation.

The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-252
Author(s):  
Ángel Alcalde
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.

Transnational History: A New Paradigm for Anti-Fascist Studies?

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
HUGO GARCÍA
Keyword(s):  
Interwar Period ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Vague Term ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of

Anti-fascism – a hallmark of the left since the 1930s, and a vague term for active opposition to Italian fascism, German Nazism and similar movements in the interwar period – used to be studied as a brief episode in the history of European nation states. The available syntheses read like collections of national studies with a clear European or Western focus. However, methodological nationalism may soon become a thing of the past – the last few years have brought a transnational turn in anti-fascist studies, which this special issue tries both to illustrate and to discuss.

Rethinking Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. xiv-26
Author(s):  
Martin Thomas ◽  
Andrew S. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Recent Growth ◽  
History Of

The book’s Introduction reflects on precisely what we understand by decolonization and considers its relevance in light of the more recent and growing interest in global history, as well as the history of globalization. The Introduction explains how the history of decolonization is being rethought as a result of the rise of the ‘new’ imperial history, and this history’s emphasis on race, gender and culture. It also discusses the more recent growth of interest in the histories of globalization and transnational history, as well as in the histories of migration and diaspora, humanitarianism and development, and human rights.

From Louisiana to Saint-Domingue and from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana

2019 ◽  
pp. 498-514
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
National History ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

The conclusion explains how this book, by reconsidering the interplay of slavery and race in French New Orleans under the influence of Saint-Domingue, has proposed an alternative way of understanding how an urban slave society operated and what it meant for a slave society to become racialized. It has also tried to better fulfill the promises of Atlantic history. Like other kinds of transnational history, Atlantic studies were conceived of as a way to move away from the primacy of the present-day nation state as a unit of analysis and from the tendency toward exceptionalism inherent to national history, but this historiographical field has not yet succeeded in fully escaping from a North-American-centric perspective. At stake is the recovery of the place the Caribbean occupied within the early Atlantic world as well as the development of a comparative and connected history of racial formation as a sociopolitical process in the Americas.

East Asia and Central Eurasia

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Perdue
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Central Eurasia ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
Economic Interaction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Soviet Central Asia

Since ancient times, East Asia and Central Eurasia have been connected to the world. Nationalist histories, however, have focused on the internal ‘unity’ of each of the nation-states of East Asia — China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam — while Central Eurasia has been fragmented into ‘Inner Asia’ (Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Manchuria) and ‘Central Asia’ (former soviet Central Asia). These arbitrary divisions ignore similarities and interactions within Asia, and they no longer fit the post-1989 world. Globalization and nationalism have now developed together. Nevertheless, East Asia and Central Eurasia have a much longer history of cultural and economic interaction than of nationalist isolation. This article suggests way to study the global connections of East Asia and Central Eurasia. It considers state contacts, stat formation and expansion, and great divergences between nations.

The Ryukyu Kingdom

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mamoru Akamine
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ryukyu Islands ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Ryukyu Islands ◽  
Okinawa Prefecture ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Japan And China

This English translation of an Okinawan scholarly voice provides a compelling new picture of the role played by the Ryukyu Kingdom in pre-modern East Asia. Mamoru Akamine first examines the early history of the Ryukyu Islands, then goes on to detail the vital role the Ryukyu Kingdom played in a vibrant East Asian trade sphere, which centered on Ming China, and connected what we now call Japan, Korea, and China with Southeast Asia. Despite the successful 1609 invasion of Ryukyu by Japan’s Satsuma domain, the kingdom was able to maintain quasi-independence for two and a half more centuries by skillfully mediating between Japan and China, who rarely dealt directly with each other. The narrative draws to a close as Akamine describes the steps leading to Ryukyu’s eventual annexation by Japan in 1879 as Okinawa Prefecture. What distinguishes this book is Akamine’s deployment of Chinese and Korean sources, depicting an East Asia made up of many moving parts, not just nation states pursuing their own interests. Yet these same sources allow him to zoom in on the small, telling particulars that make up that big picture. The reader can understand as never before the complexity of Ryukyu’s relations with its neighbors.

AFRICA IN IMPERIAL AND TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY: MULTI-SITED HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE NECESSITY OF THEORY

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Zimmerman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

AbstractA multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyond imperial history decades ago, and these fields provide important resources and models for transnational historians. Transnational history, nonetheless, always risks reproducing the boundaries between colonizer and colonized that it seeks to overcome. The need to think outside of empire from within a world structured by empires requires that historians embrace critical theory, but in a manner consistent with the groundedness of multi-sited historiography.

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