For background, see the article, Beyond Compare by Micol Seigel.
Transnational history presents a two-pronged revision to comparative historical scholarship, one methodological and one ethical. The first expands on what students of Atlantic History and African Diaspora have long recognized: many historical phenomena (slavery, trade, migration, kin-networks) overflow nation-states. Histories that confine these phenomena within national boundaries are simply inadequate, imprecise. The second revision roots transnational scholarship in a critique of U.S. imperialism, insisting that comparative history actually helps produce differences between the nations it purports to study. Far from reifying the nation-state, for Micol Seigel and other transnational historians, history should be criticizing nationalism, steadily eroding this foundation of inequality.
This double imperative is crucial to understanding the promise and peril of transnational revisions. The first revision, a challenge to what Micol Seigel calls the “hermeneutical preeminence of nations,” represents transnational history’s most enduring contribution. The second, a plea for ethical critique, is more problematic.
