Method or Ethic? The Vision of Transnational History

Seigel’s argument for studying “things that don’t conform to national borders” and finding “the global in the local” is persuasive. A few examples should demonstrate why this methodological revision is helpful. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system – “a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems” that is “the only kind of social system” in existence – corrals western Europe, southern Europe and the Americas into a single economic complex. While Wallestein’s universal scheme may be repugnant to many, his argument that economic systems are bigger than nations is convincing. At a much finer scale, Lara Putnam shows that labor patterns in the early twentieth-century Caribbean owed very little to the intervention of nation-states. People migrated according to available opportunities and kin-networks; nations merely kept the borders open. Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History – although a much different approach than Seigel – argues convincingly that one cannot understand the Americas without addressing how European nations formed colonies, nor Europe without accounting for the impact of American circumstances and ideas. For Robin D.G. Kelly, the transnational emphasis is nothing new: studies of black diasporas are inherently transnational, with their roots in a “profound pessimism” about U.S. citizenship.

At times, however, national structures need to be addressed, and comparative methods can be employed to this end. Rebecca J. Scott argues convincingly that state power – in particular the distribution of voting rights – was the key point of divergence for societies in Cuba and Louisiana. Former slaves actively pursued the right to vote in both places, but their suffrage only endured “if the state did not close down that public space.” In this case, a comparative methodology draws a clearer picture of just why conditions were so different for freedmen in Cuba and Louisiana. Scott’s work suggests that the rumors of comparative history’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

But transnational history is not just about clear pictures of the past. For Micol Seigel, it is rooted in anti-colonial scholarship and thus “has at its heart a critique of nationalism – U.S. nationalism in particular, and therefore also U.S. imperialism.” The ethical impetus here is unabashedly rooted in current concerns: “By historicizing the nation, revealing it changing over time rather than transcendent or essential, transnational scholarship can powerfully critique the nation form at a moment when we need such a critique badly.” Patriotic belief in the exceptional character of the U.S., presumably, has blinded historians to the inequality and injustice perpetuated in other lands and justified by that patriotism.

This critique of nationalism explains why comparative history is so problematic for Seigel: it lends inadvertent supports to the nationalist project. Contrary to any who would laud comparative history as a noble effort to revise nation-bound historiography, Seigel argues that by assuming the nation as the “frame of the study,” comparative history actually furthers the construction of nations. By her account, the comparative method has a long tradition as a tool of U.S. imperialism, and must therefore be cast aside. Scholars need not “feed this beast.” Similarly problematic for Seigel is scholarship that revels in the promises of globalization and neo-liberal capitalism. Implicated as it is in the “erasure” of “diasporic, subaltern, anticolonial, and queer thought and struggle”, this brand of global history does not belong in the transnational project.

Unfortunately, this commitment to critique has its own blind spots. In place of an altruistic United States bravely defending the cause of liberty around the globe, the nation is irretrievably tainted with its domination of less fortunate regions. A methodology rooted in the impossibility of “good” nationalism or imperialism is problematic indeed, a conflation of method with political purpose that lends an ephemeral, partisan cast to the transnational project. If it succeeded, and U.S. nationalism was effectively dismantled, what would replace it? If the nation-state is in fact a cultural construction particular to the historical moment, what kind of alternative constructions are Seigel and other transnational scholars proposing? If a critique is as central to the transnational project as Seigel says, these questions deserve consideration.

Despite the problems with this anti-nationalistic thrust, transnational methodology promises a welcome broadening of horizons for historians. Not only does it show the “connective tissue” of migration, cultural exchange, and economic interdependency, it creates a frame of analysis particularly useful to histories of environmental phenomena (which, after all, pay little attention to national borders) as well as studies that link production and consumption. For all its faults, transnational history provides a helpful revision.

NOTES

Seigel, “Beyond Compare”, 63.
Micol Seigel, “Uneven Encounters: Racial Construction in the Americas” (Unpublished manuscript, presented at the University of Georgia, 29 October 2007), 16.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (September 1974), 390.
Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Robin D.G. Kelly, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950”, Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999), paragraph 5.
Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 264.
Seigel, “Uneven Encounters”, 20.
Seigel, “Uneven Encounters”, 20-21.
Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn”, Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005), 63.
Seigel, “Beyond Compare”, 78.
Seigel, “Uneven Encounters, 13.
See, for example, Matthew Klingle, “Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 94-110; J.R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History," History and Theory 42 (2004); Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Tucker, Richard. Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999).